Top 100 Photography Is Quotes
#1. I was extremely irritated being photographed for a long time, then I gave up caring. Photography is a nauseating cliche, but there is a lot to it. You can tell so much about a person from it. You are exaggerating the consciousness. It's life-thickening, photography.
Peter Beard
#2. I'm afraid we get a great deal of our exposure to art through magazines and through slides and I think this is dreadful, this is anti-art because art is direct experience with something in the world and photography is just a rumor, a kind of pornography of art.
Carl Andre
#3. I am not interested in rules or conventions. Photography is not a sport.
Bill Brandt
#4. Photography is thus brought within reach of every human being who desires to preserve a record of what he sees ... and enables the fortunate possessor to go back by the light of his own fireside to scenes which would otherwise fade from memory and be lost.
George Eastman
#5. In photography we possess an extraordinary instrument for reproduction. But photography is much more than that. Today it is [a method for bringing optically] some thing entirely new into the world.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
#6. The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.
Steven Pinker
#7. It's a process of getting to know people. That's what photography is to me. It's about paying attention, not screwing up and blowing a great opportunity.
Eugene Richards
#8. The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown.
Susan Sontag
#9. For photography is a way to capture the moment - not just any moment, but the important one, this one moment out of all time when your subject is revealed to the fullest - that moment of perfection which comes once and is not repeated.
Edward Weston
#10. Photography is a brief complicity between foresight and luck.
John Stuart Mill
#11. Photography is the art of anticipation, not working with memories, but showing their formation. As such, it has relentlessly usurped imaginative and critical prerogatives of older, slower literature and handmade visual art.
Peter Schjeldahl
#12. The reason I often say, for me, photography is analogous to poetry, for my kind of work more so than journalism, is because it's so open to interpretation. And I'm very happy having different interpretations of it.
Alec Soth
#13. To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#14. [Photography is] very related to poetry. It's suggestive and fragmentary and unsatisfying in a lot of ways. It's as much about what you leave out as what you put in.
Alec Soth
#15. PHOTOGRAPHY is the best way, where you can SAVE your sweet PAST.
Aman Verma
#16. The aesthetic discussion of photography is dominated by the concept of time. Photographs appear as devices stopping time and preserving fragments of the past, like flies in amber.
Peter Wollen
#17. 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
#19. As much as I love music, in my mind, photography is what makes me the happiest - that's for sure.
Julian Lennon
#20. Photography is only intuition, a perpetual interrogation - everything except a stage set.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#21. Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.
Alfred Stieglitz
#23. The world moves fast, changing everything around us with each new day. Photography is a gift that can keep us in a moment forever, blissfully eternal.
Ali Novak
#25. The fundamental issue is one of emphasis: you are not a photographer because you are interested in photography ... The reason is that photography is only a tool, a vehicle, for expressing or transmitting a passion in something else. It is not the end result.
David Hurn
#26. All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation.
Ansel Adams
#27. Photography is 10% inspiration and 90% moving furniture.
Helmut Newton
#28. Photography is one big scrapbook of your life.
Lisa Jones
#29. Photography is the very conscience of painting. It constantly reminds the later of what it must not do.
Brassai
#30. There are a lot of people who think celebrities shouldn't complain, that the photography is just a price to pay for having this career. I guess that's bizarre. What they don't understand is that this is all stuff that's really new.
Megan Fox
#31. Photography is my method for defining the confusing world that rushes constantly toward me. It is my defensive attempt to reduce our daily chaos to a set of understandable images.
Arthur Tress
#32. Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real.
Ansel Adams
#33. Photography is always a kind of stealing. A theft from the subject. Artists are assaulters in a lot of ways, and the viewer is complicit in that assault.
Hanya Yanagihara
#34. Photography is more about money now but then so are most things.
David Bailey
#35. Photography is art when it's used by an artist.
Ruth Bernhard
#37. Photography is a transformation, not a reproduction.
Ernst Haas
#38. Does not the very word 'creative' mean to build, to initiate, to give out, to act - rather than to be acted upon, to be subjective? Living photography is positive in its approach, it sings a song of life - not death.
Berenice Abbott
#39. 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
#40. I was born in Hoboken. I am an American. Photography is my passion. The search for Truth my obsession.
Alfred Stieglitz
#41. I believe that this whole question of some photography being true and some untrue is a non-question. Photography is not objective; it never was objective.
Tibor Kalman
#42. Photography is the easiest thing to make, and one of the hardest things to make well.
Jerry Saltz
#43. What I find most satisfying about photography is the way in which it allows me to document 'reality' while at the same time creating my own version thereof; in other words, the reality I present is a reality based upon what I choose to include in the frame and what I choose to leave out.
Alix Smith
#44. Polaroid, you know, goes against everything that photography is now. You can't make multiples. Only one exists. I love that. By the way, while we've been talking I've now seen a total of three people I know walking on 8th street.
Laurel Nakadate
#45. If you view your life as a piece of fabric or a tapestry, the photography is the stitching. It keeps everything together.
Joe McNally
#47. Photography is about a single point of a moment. It's like stopping time. As everything gets condensed in that forced instant. But if you keep creating these points, they form a line which reflects your life.
Nobuyoshi Araki
#49. I have tried to bring about better communication between people. I believe that humanitarian photography is like economics. Economy is a kind of sociology, as is documentary photography.
Sebastiao Salgado
#50. The biggest lesson in photography is that from negative we make a positive
Josef Koudelka
#51. Traditionally, photography is supposed to capture an event that has passed; but that is not what I'm looking for. Photography brings the past into the present when you look at it.
Julian Schnabel
#52. Photography is like a moment, an instant. You need a half-second to get the photo. So it's good to capture people when they are themselves.
Patrick Demarchelier
#53. Photography is not cute cats, nor nudes, motherhood or arrangements of manufactured products. Under no circumstances it is anything ever anywhere near a beach.
Walker Evans
#55. The world of your photography is limitless-just like your backyard.
Nick Kelsh
#56. Nothing is more intriguing than a still photograph in the middle of a motion picture ... Just as an accident is a cry changed into silence and not a silence after a cry, photography is speed rendered motionless ...
Jean Cocteau
#57. Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.
Peter Adams
#58. What I like so much about photography is precisely the moment that cannot be anticipated; one must be constantly on the alert, ready to acclaim the unexpected.
Martine Franck
#60. 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
#61. If photography is to be likened to perception, this is not because the former is a natural process but because the latter is also coded.
Umberto Eco
#62. Real photography is a wonderfully inclusive, democratic medium, whereas art photography is more often a private pursuit by conmen.
Philip Jones Griffiths
#63. Photography is a witness against the mistaken opinion that art is an imitation of nature.
Heinrich Heine
#64. The battle for the acceptance of photography as Art was not only counter-productive but counter-revolutionary. The most important photography is most emphatically not Art.
A. D. Coleman
#65. Photography is like an open book to the world.
Lisa Jones
#66. The practice of photography is no longer a means for recording reality. Instead, it has become reality itself
Ai Weiwei
#67. The thing about photography is, some people surround themselves with extremely strong subject matter. And unless you're a moron, you're going to get a really strong photograph.
Andy Summers
#68. I say half jokingly that photography is the most difficult of the arts. It does require a certain arrogance to see and to choose. I feel myself walking on a tightrope instead of on the ground.
Walker Evans
#69. Whenever the medium of photography is useful for a particular task, I use it. If another medium is more suitable I use that.
Hans Haacke
#70. Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever ... it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.
Aaron Siskind
#71. Photography is such an important instrument in the education of our feelings and perception because of its duality. Photography represents the world we know, and suggests a world beyond what we can see. Creativity is the gap between perception and knowledge.
Emmet Gowin
#72. 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
#73. Photography is and is not a language; language also is and is not a photography.
William J. Mitchell
#74. Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment.
Ansel Adams
#76. For me the true business of photography is to capture a bit of reality (whatever that is) on film ... if, later, the reality means something to someone else, so much the better.
Garry Winogrand
#77. Photography is very subjective. Photography is not a document on which a report can be made. It is a subjective document. Photography is a false witness, a lie.
Robert Doisneau
#78. The purpose of photography is to create an emotion about the world through what has been carefully seen and selected.
Eli Siegel
#79. [Photography is] in some ways false just because it is so exact.
Eugene Delacroix
#80. To me, photography is about finding something interesting in an ordinary place ... I've found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.
Elliot Erwitt
#81. Photography is humbling, it really is, and it really allows for me to atone for some of the missteps I've made throughout the course of my life.
Jamel Shabazz
#82. Photography is a very important part of my life.
Conrad Hall
#83. Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.
Susan Sontag
#84. I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photography - that it is purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in the with the history of painting and other art forms.
Joel Meyerowitz
#85. Photography is more than a window for me. Photography is more like a space that tries to capture situations.
Gabriel Orozco
#86. Photography is something you learn to love very quickly. I know that many, many things are going to ask me to have their pictures taken and I will take them all.
Jacques-Henri Lartigue
#87. Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work.
Martin Parr
#88. Photography is a strange phenomenon ... You trust your eye and cannot help but bare your soul.
Inge Morath
#89. Because it's free, easy to use, and high-quality, photography is now a fixture in our daily lives - something we take for granted.
Peter Diamandis
#90. Painting requires skill. Photography is created by the camera, and one cannot fully control what the camera sees. So people take many photographs because several must always be discarded.
Igor Babailov
#92. Photography is a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing. The contest can be held anywhere ...
John Szarkowski
#94. Photography is a very subtle thing. You must let the camera take you by the hand, as it were, and lead you into your subject.
Margaret Bourke-White
#96. Photography is about finding things. And painting is different - it's about making something.
Saul Leiter
#97. I got a lot of flak originally for writing with photographs, because the great cliche in photography is that one photograph is worth a thousand words, and photographers are usually dodo birds anyway.
Duane Michals
#98. 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
#99. Photography is a universal language, transcending the boundaries of race, politics, and nationality.
Arthur Rothstein
#100. Photography is the most transparent of the art mediums devised or discovered by man. It is probably for this reason that it proves so difficult to make the photograph transcend its almost inevitable function as document and act as a work of art as well.
Clement Greenberg
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