Top 100 Photography Is Quotes
#1. The key is to integrate our art into our life, not the other way around.
Brooks Jensen
#2. The emphasis in doing any in-depth photography is on building relationships, quality relationships. It's what I call thirty-cups-of-coffee-a-frame photography. You need to enter into the community - not just photographically, but intellectually and emotionally.
Lynn Johnston
#3. Speed, the fundamental condition of the activities of our day is the power of photography, indeed the modern art of today, the art of the split second.
Lisette Model
#4. Perishability in a photograph is important in a picture. If a photograph looks perishable we say, "Gee, I'm glad I have that moment."
John Loengard
#5. I'm not a religious person. The language of photography is symbolic.
Sebastiao Salgado
#6. Being a celebrity you always get really good seats to sporting events but you never get as good seats as the photographers get. And I really love sports. So one of the scams I have going now is I want to learn sports photography so I can get better seats at a sporting event.
Drew Carey
#7. Photograph because you love doing it, because you absolutely have to do it, because the chief reward is going to be the process of doing it. Other rewards - recognition, financial remuneration - come to so few and are so fleeting ... Take photography on as a passion, not a career.
Alex Webb
#8. To me, the work I do is a means of interpreting unsettling truths, of bearing witness, and of sounding an alarm. The beauty of formal representation both carries an affirmation of life and subversively brings us face to face with news from our besieged world.
Richard Misrach
#9. My focus is anything that allows me to express myself. Rap, dance, photography. Those are my forms of expression.
Keith Stanfield
#10. Photography is 1% talent and 99% moving furniture.
Arnold Newman
#11. I often think we do not take this business of photography in a sufficiently serious spirit. Issuing a photograph is like marriage: you can only undo the mischief with infinite woe ...
H.G.Wells
#13. White is the color of decomposition. White is also no color. White is nothing. In photography, the paper is white, next comes the light, which is also white, then the shadow is created, the apparition.
Dieter Appelt
#14. Photographers feel guilty that all they do for a living is press a button.
Andy Warhol
#15. It seems so utterly naive that landscape - not that of the pictorial school - is not considered of "social significance" when it has a far more important bearing on the human race of a given locale than excrescences called cities.
Edward Weston
#16. Photography is like a river with a thousand streams that never converge.
Massimo Vitali
#17. One thing that struck me early is that you don't put into a photograph what's going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.
Diane Arbus
#18. I like to think that the music is a mixture of personal experiences mixed with photography and movies.
Sune Rose Wagner
#19. There comes a moment when it is no longer you who takes the photograph, but receives the way to do it quite naturally and fully.
Sebastiao Salgado
#20. There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.
Ernst Haas
#21. The photographer is a manipulator of light; photography is a manipulation of light.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
#22. The thing that was most interesting to me was getting my first prints back from the printer and realizing photography doesn't end with the click of a button, it starts there. Printing is so exciting.
Bryan Adams
#23. Probably one of the worst things that happened to photography is that cameras have viewfinders.
John Baldessari
#24. With light field technology, there is a huge opportunity for creativity in photography that hasn't been available in the past.
Ren Ng
#25. Photography isolates the world via an aperture and gives the photographer the means to see differently, to achieve a spontaneous vision that is direct and uncompromising.
Ellsworth Kelly
#26. In the act of love, as in photography, there is a form of life and a kind of slow death,
Nobuyoshi Araki
#28. A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.
Mark Twain
#29. [Photography] underlines the photographer. That's the Barthesian this has been. Well, this has been for the photographer as well. The photographer is the hidden placeholder in the Barthesian equation.
James Welling
#30. Privilege, if you're very strict, is an immoral and unjust thing to have, but if you've got it you didn't choose to get it and you might as well use it. You're privileged to be at Yale, but you know you're under an obligation to repay what's been put into you.
Walker Evans
#31. The thing that's fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.
Imogen Cunningham
#32. A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about.
Richard Avedon
#34. Good films are not made by accident, nor is good photography. You can have good things happen, on occasion, by accident that can be applied at that moment in a film, but your craft isn't structured around such things, except in beer commercials.
Gordon Willis
#35. For me, Picasso was the ultimate man. He taught me that photography is all about how you approach an image: what you do and what you don't do. He inspired me to go beyond what you think is in front of you.
Rene Burri
#36. I've seen so many photographers rush to do books the minute they start shooting, but one great thing about photography is that the images don't go away, so the more I sit with these images, the more I learn which ones have had the most impact.
Lynsey Addario
#38. I may be wrong, but the essential illustrative nature of most documentary photography, and the worship of the object per se, in our best nature photography, is not enough to satisfy the man of today, compounded as he is of Christ, Freud, and Marx.
Aaron Siskind
#39. Perhaps most intriguing of all is that it is possible to photograph what is impossible for the human eye to see - cumulative time.
Michael Kenna
#40. This is the gift of the landscape photograph, that the heart finds a place to stand.
Emmet Gowin
#41. Emailing a meaningful photograph to someone who is not expecting it can change a relationship forever.
Nick Kelsh
#42. What I love about photography, and it's the same thing I love about acting, really, is that it forces you, like, right into the moment, where you can't be distracted, where you can't be, like, thinking about other things or ahead of yourself or behind yourself.
Jessica Lange
#43. This profession [photography] is deserving of attention and respect equal to that accorded painting, literature, music and architecture.
Ansel Adams
#44. The function of the photographer is to help people understand the world around them.
Sid Grossman
#45. I always feel it's necessary to look at my images from two distances. Here is my criterion: If I can look at it from a distance and then come up close but find nothing more to see, it's printed too large. It's not giving me any new information when I come up to it.
Bruce Barnbaum
#46. Photography is about how you look and how you dream and how you see and what your interests are.
David Doubilet
#47. Photography, to me, is the dewdrop that reflects my inner and outer worlds simultaneously.
Raghubir Singh
#48. Life is a journey, photography is thy shepherd.
Destin Sparks
#49. Now Ben Folds is my photography older brother. He was kind enough to give me a photo of his for my 40th birthday.
Jason Sudeikis
#50. In the end, photography for me is just an excuse to get to know the world.
Graciela Iturbide
#51. I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else. Excitement about the subject is the voltage which pushes me over the mountain of drudgery necessary to produce the final photograph.
Berenice Abbott
#52. One of my passions is photography. I always carry a camera in my bag whenever I travel. I always take pictures wherever I go, and some of them end up being really crazy ones.
Sunidhi Chauhan
#53. As time passes by and you look at portraits, the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit. Photography has something to do with death. It's a trace.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#54. 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
#55. It's the subject matter that counts. I'm interested in revealing the subject in a new way to intensify it. A photo is able to capture a moment that people can't always see.
Harry Callahan
#56. What the eye sees is a synthesis of who you are and all you have learned. This is what I would call the language of photography.
Graciela Iturbide
#57. A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.
Susan Sontag
#58. To me, photography is like a quest, or a pilgrimage, or a hunt. I love painting, I love music, but photography is what has allowed me to get outside of myself.
Edouard Boubat
#59. Photography is, and has been since its conception, a fabulously broad church. Contemporary practice demonstrates that the medium can be a prompt, a process, a vehicle, a collective pursuit, and not just the physical end product of solitary artists' endeavors.
Charlotte Cotton
#60. One thing I would never photograph is a dog lying in the mud.
Diane Arbus
#61. Before you shoot an irresistible subject, mute all your senses except sight to find out how much is left for the camera to record.
Andreas Feininger
#62. The hardest part about photography is getting out of bed.
Ken Duncan
#63. I think photography is a universal language as far as storytelling goes, and I think that's what it's most successful at.
Mary Mattingly
#64. A lot of photography is making records of people, as objects, friends. It's like organizing a wardrobe - in terms of size etc.
Francesca Woodman
#65. I know the expression love bloomed is metaphorical, but in my heart in this moment, there is one badass flower, captured in time-lapse photography, going from bud to wild radiant blossom in ten seconds flat.
Jandy Nelson
#66. The work of the artist is not so much what you say or what you know, it's recognizing what you know. That's what life is about. That's what photography is about. You see something, or you hear someone say something, and you say That is a truth. You know, deep in you. That's when you start shooting.
Sylvia Plachy
#67. The art of news photography is creating compelling, graphic compositions that communicate environment and emotion. Strung together, they take the viewer on a progression of discovery until the mystery is revealed.
Rich Underwood
#69. In short, [photography] is a matter of turning loneliness into thoughts.
Shomei Tomatsu
#70. Oh my goodness gracious, what you can buy off the Internet in terms of overhead photography. A trained ape can know an awful lot of what is going on in this world, just by punching on his mouse, for a relatively modest cost.
Donald Rumsfeld
#71. Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.
Steven Pinker
#72. Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity.
Will Self
#73. The Indians say to draw someone's portrait is to steal their soul, i am taking photographs, does it mean that i am just borrowing them?
T.A
#74. It's just seeing - at least the photography I care about. You either see or you don't see. The rest is academic. Anyone can learn how to develop. It's how you organize what you see into a picture.
Elliott Erwitt
#75. Photography is without mercy
though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.
Nick Harkaway
#76. 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
#77. The photograph is completely abstracted from life, yet it looks like life. That is what has always excited me about photography.
Richard Kalvar
#79. When the light is right and everything is working for me, I feel as tense as when making a difficult maneuver high on a mountain. A minute - and sometimes mere seconds - can make the difference between a superb image and a mundane one.
Galen Rowell
#80. 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
#81. If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.
James Whistler
#82. There is so much more to the things that we think we know from afar. The close you get the more complex it is, not the simpler it is to understand.
Susan Meiselas
#83. It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.
David Bailey
#84. There are two dirty words in photography, one is art, the other is good taste
Helmut Newton
#85. Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
Susan Sontag
#86. When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.
Aleksandar Hemon
#87. For me, photography is as much about the way I respond to the subject as it is about the subject itself.
Alec Soth
#88. What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that's gone forever, impossible to reproduce.
Karl Lagerfeld
#89. I usually befriend the camera department very early on in the film and drive them nuts. I'm constantly bombarding them with questions and going through the stills photography. A film set is a great place for me and I love it.
Eric Bana
#90. Photography has no rules, it is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it is achieved.
Bill Brandt
#91. How do you find a way to say what an extraordinary experience it is to be alive in this world? That is the kind of subject matter I try to work with.
Keith Carter
#92. Photography is the easiest medium with which to be merely competent. Almost anybody can be competent. It's the hardest medium in which to have some sort of personal vision and to have a signature style.
Chuck Close
#93. Every photograph that is made whether by one who considers himself a professional, or by the tourist who points his snapshot camera and pushes a button, is a response to the exterior world, to something perceived outside himself by the person who operates the camera.
Eliot Porter
#94. They say a picture is worth 1,000 words. I say its closer to 675 or 700.
A.E. Samaan
#96. One impulse of photography, as immediate as its impulse to extend the visible, is to theatricalize its subjects. The photographer's command, Watch the birdie! is essentially a stage direction.
Stanley Cavell
#97. Your own photography is never enough. Every photographer who has lasted has depended on other peoples pictures too - photographs that may be public or private, serious or funny, but that carry with them a reminder of community.
Robert Adams
#98. The only way to kill death is through photography.
Jean Cocteau
#99. A photograph is a picture and no more true or false than any other depiction; why is that so hard to comprehend?
Bill Jay
#100. I've never taken a script to the stage or to principal photography and said, "This is perfect. This is as good as it can possibly be." It's not Shakespeare, you know; you know it can probably be better.
Harold Ramis
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