Photography Is An Art Quotes

#1. Photography is an art of observation - it's about creating something extraordinary out of the ordinary. You choose a frame and then wait until the right time for something magical to come along and fill it.

Elliott Erwitt

#2. Photography is an art which touches and grips one's own heart's blood.

Edvard Munch

#3. I don't like the discussions about whether photography is an art. Even though I think that if it would be just a craft I would not have stayed with it all my life.

Josef Sudek

#4. Some people's photography is an art. Not mine. Art is a dirty word in photography. All this fine art crap is killing it already.

Helmut Newton

#5. Photography is an art of teleporting the past into the future.

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#6. Photography is just a medium. It's like a typewriter. Photography as an art doesn't interest me an awful lot; as a participant, though I like to look at it.

Ezra Stoller

#7. The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.

Alfred Stieglitz

#8. Is photography an art? There is no point in trying to find out if it is an art. Art is old-fashioned. We need something else.

Man Ray

#9. Only in black and white can I see the design and textures. I don't consider color photography art. Black and white is an interpretation. Color is a duplication.

Clyde Butcher

#10. Photography is art when it's used by an artist.

Ruth Bernhard

#11. Photography is a witness against the mistaken opinion that art is an imitation of nature.

Heinrich Heine

#12. What is important is that our optical awareness rids itself of classical notions of beauty and opens itself more and more to the beauty of the instant and of these surprising points of view that appear for a brief moment and never return; those are what make photography an art.

Raoul Hausmann

#13. Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.

Susan Sontag

#14. There is more in art, with an apology to that much abused word, as applied to photography, than startling display lines, on mounts and signs announcing artist Photographer, Artistic Photography Studio, etc., and the lower the standard the more frantic the claim ...

Gertrude Kasebier

#15. I mean, certainly writing, painting, photography, dance, architecture, there is an aspect of almost every art form that is useful and that merges into film in some way.

Sydney Pollack

#16. A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

Richard Avedon

#17. What attracts me in photography is not so much a fine arts approach, but rather photographs as documents ... All the ways in which human beings have documented the world in an attempt to order it, in an attempt to consume it or rule it or hang on to it in some sense.

Zoe Leonard

#18. I can be an artist a posteriori, not a priori. If my pictures tell the story, our story, human story, then in a hundred years, then they can be considered an art reference, but now they are not made as art. I'm a journalist. My life's on the road, my studio is the planet.

Sebastiao Salgado

#19. I hate it when people say, I'm an artist. I think, well, I'll be the judge of that. And I don't think artist is a job description. It's a critique, a favorable critique, that someone else might apply to your work. I guess in the art world I'm not exactly a photographer, but I do use photography.

John Waters

#20. If you take 2001: A Space Odyssey as an example of somebody who creates a new language in film by what he was able to accomplish with art direction, photography, lighting, etc., it is still a gold standard for science fiction.

Matthew Modine

#21. To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

#22. No one can really explain in a rational way what makes a good photograph or a bad photograph ... This is why the art world will not throw billions of dollars at photography the way it has at painting; and that is what makes it an exciting medium.

David Wojnarowicz

#23. PHOTOGRAPH, n. A picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. It is a little better than the work of an Apache, but not quite so good as that of a Cheyenne.

Ambrose Bierce

#24. If the photographer isn't going to pay attention to the picture he is making, that if he thinks the camera is just a machine and not an avenue of expression, then he has no business asking anyone for anything, let alone their time and interest. Don't show the world, he said, invent the world.

Whitney Otto

#25. I understood the craft of photography when done by an artist is art.

Ruth Bernhard

#26. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

Susan Sontag

#27. When painting portraits a lot of people say, 'Why not get a photograph of the person?' Photography is wonderful and it is an art form in itself, but ... my portrait is a culmination of elements ... a truer image of a person than just the 'click' of a snapshot.

Jamie Wyeth

#28. I've always thought photography is not so much of an art form but a way of communicating and passing on information.

Don McCullin

#29. Photography is an itch that wont go away. No matter how much you scratch it.

Dara McGrath

#30. The discussion about whether photography is or isn't art is dated and of no interest. Your work makes you an artist, not your title.

Peter Lindbergh

#31. What's so incredibly amusing with photography is that while seemingly an art of the surface, it catches things I haven't even noticed. And it pains me not to have seen things in all their depth.

Jacques-Henri Lartigue

#32. Contemporary art photography is paradoxical. Anyone can look at it and form an opinion about what they see. Yet it usually represents aesthetic and theoretical positions that only a small minority of well-informed viewers can access.

Lucy Soutter

#33. Art is nothing more than creating an emotion in your own form.

Shannon L. Alder

#34. It would be mistaken to suppose that any of the best photography is come at by intellection; it is like all art, essentially the result of an intuitive process, drawing on all that the artist is rather than on anything he thinks, far less theorizes about.

Helen Levitt

#35. An artist's job is to inspire, from the Latin inspirare: to breathe into. The primary function of art is to inspire new thought shaped by emotions using the creative mediums we master - be it painting, music, design, craft, or photography.

Anonymous

#36. It is because of the servility of photography that I am fundamentally contemptuous of this chance invention which will never be an art but which plagiarizes nature by means of optics. (1848)

Alphonse De Lamartine