Photography Ideas Quotes

#1. If you are not passionately devoted to an idea, you can make very pleasant pictures but they won't make you cry.

Ruth Bernhard

#2. The key to artistic photography is to work out your own thoughts, by yourselves. Imitation leads to certain disaster. New ideas are always antagonized. Do not mind that. If a thing is good it will survive.

Gertrude Kasebier

#3. As sounds in a musical composition can be used not to express physical objects but ideas, emotions, harmonies, rhythmic orders and most any expression of the human mind and spirit, so light can be used visually to express the mind and spirit.

Wynn Bullock

#4. Every successful photograph, except for lucky shots, begins with an idea and a plan. The more precisely a photographer knows what it is he wishes to do, the better the chances are that he will do it.

Andreas Feininger

#5. My first reaction at the very idea of this interview was to refuse to talk about photography. Why dissect and comment a process that is essentially a spontaneous reaction to a surprise?

Marc Riboud

#6. I believed it was necessary to investigate photography, dismantle it, jettison all the non-essential components, and begin again with a stripped down but more powerful idea of what is, or could be photographic.

Lewis Baltz

#7. There are many forms of photography. I consider myself simply a recorder of that which I find of interest around me. I personally have no desire to create or stage direct ideas.

David Hurn

#8. The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.

Susan Sontag

#9. The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.

Edward Steichen

#10. Mostly the subject of the photograph, which can be anyone really, coming down the street - someone that has no idea. "Heroism" in photography, just like in a novel, is for everyone.

Hedi Slimane

#11. When the novice photographer starts taking pictures, he carries his camera about and shoots everything that interests him. There comes a time when he must crystallize his ideas and set off in an particular direction. He must learn that shooting for the sake of shooting is dull and unprofitable.

Alexey Brodovitch

#12. The most prevalent way of working in photography right now is project oriented: you go after an idea. I like the old way, the intuitive approach. You follow your nose and take pictures and see what emerges. It happens after the fact.

Mark Klett

#13. Your ideas come out of the way you conduct your life.

Keith Carter

#14. I take more to the subject than to my ideas about it. I am not interested in any idea I have had, the subject is so demanding and so important.

Lee Friedlander

#15. Many photographers are consumed with the idea of making beautiful contact sheets. I am far more interested in making the best final print I can.

John Sexton

#16. Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.

Ansel Adams

#17. Like any corporation, I have the benefit of the brainpower of everyone who is working for me. It all ends up being my work, the corporate me, but everyone extends ideas and comes up with suggestions.

Chuck Close

#18. Simulations directly relate to the process of and complications in photography. They also overtly create layers of fantasies, myths and interventions ... The simulation confuses the idea of a truth. I've always been interested in this kind of theater and illusion at the foundation of belief.

Taryn Simon

#19. All my film ideas and subjects have come from photography.

Lauren Greenfield

#20. Visual ideas combined with technology combined with personal interpretation equals photography. Each must hold it's own; if it doesn't, the thing collapses.

Arnold Newman

#21. DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)

Gustave Flaubert

#22. For me photography is just a way to collect material to realize the ideas in my mind. I get inspired by things around me in my daily life and all kinds of things I see. Every new project is a new challenge and my goal is to realize them as realistic as possible.

Erik Johansson

#23. Is it possible to put an end to a form of human behavior which has existed throughout history by means of photography? The proportions of that notion seem ridiculously out of balance. Yet, that very idea has motivated me.

James Nachtwey

#24. The idea of photography as evidence is pure bullshit. A photo is no more proof of any reality than what you may hear being said by someone in a bus. We only record details, small fragments of the world.

Marc Riboud

#25. To me, photography was a completely new medium, and I did not ... feel the urge to transfer to it my ideas about painting.

John Gutmann

#26. We are drowning in images. Photography is used as a propaganda tool, which serves to sell products and ideas. I use the same approach to show aspects of reality.

Martin Parr

#27. Although I get a lot of ideas from things that have happened in my life, I see the final product as a place where my imagination meets my experience. What I love about photography is that nothing is really as it seems.

Laurel Nakadate

#28. It began when I was so ill that there was a good chance of dying. I promised myself that if I survived I would never again pander to a magazine's requests or follow the ideas of art directors. I would only make images which were personal, which arose out of my own life.

Helmut Newton

#29. The authentic thing is to follow your heart, your instincts, your emotions. If you located yourself in an idea, your life would be lived very sadly.

Emmet Gowin

#30. A camera has interesting ideas of its own.

John Szarkowski

#31. I'm a photographer and retoucher from Sweden. I use photography as a way of collecting material to realize the ideas in my mind.

Erik Johansson

#32. I like the idea that the sacred photo framing process is equally violatible and I think that's partly a carryover from the way I deal with structures to the way I deal with photography.

Gordon Matta-Clark

#33. When photography was invented, people had to make room in their minds for the idea that the dead would always be visible.

Vicki Goldberg

#34. Photography suits the temper of this age - of active bodies and minds. It is a perfect medium for one whose mind is teeming with ideas, imagery, for a prolific worker who would be slowed down by painting or sculpting, for one who sees quickly and acts decisively, accurately.

Edward Weston

#35. Photography is there to construct the idea of us as a great family and we go on vacations and take these pictures and then we look at them later and we say, 'Isn't this a great family?' So photography is instrumental in creating family not only as a memento, a souvenir, but also a kind of mythology.

Larry Sultan

#36. People buy ideas, they don't buy photographs.

Annie Leibovitz

#37. Photography Cannot Record Abstract Ideas (Title of a 16x20 inch photograph depicting an index card on which that phrase is handwritten.)

Mel Bochner

#38. We do not make photographs with our cameras. We make them with our minds, with our hearts, with our ideas.

Arnold Newman

#39. The lens, that allegedly impartial eye, permits all possible distortions of reality ... The importance of photography lies not only in the fact that it is a creation, but above all in the fact that it is one of the most effective means of shaping our ideas and influencing our behavior.

Gisele Freund

#40. Let me here call attention to one of the most universally popular mistakes that have to do with photography - that of classing supposedly excellent work as professional, and using the term amateur to convey the idea of immature productions and to excuse atrociously poor photographs.

Alfred Stieglitz

#41. We think of photography as pictures. And it is. But I think of photography as ideas. And do the pictures sustain your ideas or are they just good pictures? I want to have an experience in the world that is a deepening experience, that makes me feel alive and awake and conscious.

Joel Meyerowitz

#42. It's all the same. It's the same face. We always look for an idea, for the same face, for the same position. There is no such thing as a European or an African photography. It's all the same thing.

Malick Sidibe

#43. We live in a time of the greatest precision and of maximum contrasts: photomontage offers us a means to express this. It shows ideas: photography shows us objects.

Herbert Bayer

#44. I really don't have any idea about photography, but I take pictures.

Alex Majoli

#45. This idea fascinates me. The idea that a few seconds of watching a photographer in action can tell you his/her status in the medium. And it's true. If you watch a photographer of merit working an event he/she does not look like an amateur ...

David Hurn