Top 100 Photography Photographer Quotes
#1. I don't think of myself as a photographer. I've engaged questions regarding photography's role in culture ... but it is an engagement with a problem rather than a medium.
Sarah Charlesworth
#3. If the photographer is interested in the people in front of his lens, and if he is compassionate, it's already a lot. The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.
Eve Arnold
#4. It was only with the emergence of the Conceptualist approaches of the late 1960s that the opposition between artists using photography and photographers became explicit.
Jean-Francois Chevrier
#5. But I always liked the fact that you get these totally unacceptable images, but they're taken by a really expensive photographer, with great light, and in terms of the quality of the photograph it's a great photograph, but in terms of imagery it's unacceptable, and I like that contradiction.
Damien Hirst
#6. But I did not always know just what it was I wanted to photograph. I believe it is important for a photographer to discover this, for unless he finds what it is that excites him, what it is that calls forth at once an emotional response, he is unlikely to achieve his best work.
Bill Brandt
#7. And I'm a pretty avid photographer, I've been into photography for years now, so I try to spend some of my free time with that.
Danny McBride
#8. The photographer does the world a great disservice when he leaves his camera at home.
Mark Denman
#9. It is every photographer's responsibility to discover new images and a new personal way of looking at things. If he can do this his pictures will command attention and have surprise quality.
Alexey Brodovitch
#10. Photography is like a found object. A photographer never makes an actual subject; they just steal the image from the world ... Photography is a system of saving memories. It's a time machine, in a way, to preserve the memory, to preserve time.
Hiroshi Sugimoto
#11. Photographers, like kids, should be seen and not heard.
Bill Jay
#12. Money and fame that photography can bring you are wonderful, but nothing can compare to the joy of seeing something new.
Jay Maisel
#13. There's this way that photography is always about going out searching. I'm not the kind of a photographer who can photograph my home.
Justine Kurland
#14. A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.
George Bernard Shaw
#15. True, there are photographers who are failed artists, but so are most artists.
Bill Jay
#16. The act of photography is like going on a hunt in which photographer and camera merge into one indivisible function. This is a hunt for new states of things, situations never seen before, for the improbable, for information.
Vilem Flusser
#17. As a photographer, I'm interested in how dramatically photography has changed. Most images are not real or are composites, and most of us don't even know it anymore.
David Allee
#18. Photographers undervalue the use of the wastebasket in their pursuit of fine photography.
Ralph Steiner
#19. It is the photographer's decision at the two levels of seeing the picture - when it is shot and when it is chosen and printed that determines his personal style.
Alexey Brodovitch
#20. Pay no heed to the average photographer's remarks upon "flat" and "weak" negatives. Probably he is flat, weak, stale, and unprofitable; your negative may be first-rate, and probably is if he does not approve of it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#21. To be a photographer, one must photograph. No amount of book learning, no checklist of seminars attended, can substitute for the simple act of making pictures.
Harry Callahan
#23. First rule to be a photographer, you have to be invisible.
Sameh Talhamy
#24. There's a rapport that any photographer is going to have with his subject matter. And if you don't have a rapport, you're going to find the task of photographing it difficult.
Bruce Barnbaum
#25. I only know how to approach a place by walking. For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown, or the secret heat of the known awaits just around the corner.
Alex Webb
#26. My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.
Helmut Newton
#27. When I first started to take photographs in Czechoslovakia, I met this old gentleman, this old photographer, who told me a few practical things. One of the things he said was, "Josef, a photographer works on the subject, but the subject works on the photographer."
Josef Koudelka
#28. One thing that Life and I agreed right from the start was that one war photographer was enough for my family; I was to be a photographer of peace.
Cornell Capa
#29. If you want to photograph a man spinning, give some thought to why he spins. Understanding for a photographer is as important as the equipment he uses.
Margaret Bourke-White
#30. Photographers, along with dentists, are the two professions never satisfied with what they do. Every dentist would like to be a doctor and inside every photographer is a painter trying to get out.
Pablo Picasso
#31. 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
#33. A poor photographer meets chance one out of a hundred times and a good photographer meets chance all the time.
Brassai
#34. Photography is a love affair with life.
Burk Uzzle
#35. Why do photographers photograph? To make unreality visible.
Bill Jay
#36. You must have a visual sense if you want to be a photographer. It is a very subtle thing, this visual business.
Elliott Erwitt
#37. I am a professional photographer by trade and an amateur photographer by vocation.
Elliot Erwitt
#38. 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
#39. For me it is clear that photography prizes should be for those being photographed and not for the photographers.
Subcomandante Marcos
#40. Many people misunderstand me - I'm quite happy to be called a photographer. All of a sudden, the art world has caught up with photography, and they are trying to hijack us.
Don McCullin
#41. How aware were photographers in the past of other visual arts? "No photographer of any distinction at all could approach his work without some awareness of what was going on in other visual media, and for that matter neither the painter nor the draughtsman could ignore photography."
Aaron Scharf
#42. [The] arresting of time is photography's unique capacity, and the decision of when to click the shutter is the photographer's chief responsibility.
Janet Malcolm
#43. When the world asks "what was it like?" Only the photographer can say "See!
Mark Denman
#44. You are either born to be a photographer or not. The art of photography is not something you can learn in the classroom or by watching someone do it.
Nobuyoshi Araki
#45. The purpose of photography is the transmission of a visualized sector of life through the medium of the camera into a mental process that starts with the photographer's thinking about the subject he photographs and is continued in the mind of the spectator.
Roman Vishniac
#46. I was making photographs of the world long before I was a photographer.
Marcey Jacobson
#47. [Postmodern photography] implies the exhaustion of the image universe: it suggests that a photographer can find more than enough images already existing in the world without the bother of making new ones.
Andy Grundberg
#48. I think of myself as a reportage photographer. I like the word. It implies a personal account of an observed event with connotations of subjectivity but honesty. It is eye-witness photography.
David Hurn
#49. I had no real photography experience, thankfully. I consciously took a lot of crowd shots. I was influenced by Seattle photographer Charles Peterson, who always seemed to incorporate fans in his live band shots.
Bruce Pavitt
#50. My mom was a medical photographer, but on the side, she did a before-and-after glam photography business in the house. She would do makeup and hair - and I was her assistant.
Tyra Banks
#51. 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
#52. Aesthetics does not exist for the camera as an isolated entity. Aesthetics, in fact, is inseparable from the purpose of the photographer and the use he makes of his theme. When photography fails ... it is usually because a false separation has been imposed on form and content.
Sid Grossman
#53. Judging by the photograph it seemed like I hadn't been there at all. As if it was my camera that had been on holiday, and not me.
Ida Lokas
#54. Pictures you have taken have an influence on those that you are going to make. That's life!
John Sexton
#55. If it is practiced by a man of taste, the photograph will have the appearance of art (but) the photographer must ... intervene as little as possible, so as not to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses.
Henri Matisse
#57. Obviously, we can see what was in front of the camera, but if a photograph is honestly made, it's a bit of a self-portrait. I think it's impossible for a photographer who is working honestly to keep this from happening.
John Sexton
#58. When I was working with Robert Frank, he told me that there was absolutely no relationship between cinema and photography. I challenge that. Surely what you know as a photographer must impact how you set up your shots.
Ralph Gibson
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. I'm a photographer, period. I love photography, the immediacy of it. I like the craft, the idea of saying 'I'm a photographer.'
David LaChapelle
#62. When I worked as a music and fashion photographer, I always had the nagging feeling that there was something missing, that I wasn't using my skills productively. I gave up photography - I walked away from it completely - and started doing care work.
Giles Duley
#63. 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
#64. If I knew how to take a good photograph, I'd do it every time.
Robert Doisneau
#65. I like to photograph anyone before they know what their best angles are.
Ellen Von Unwerth
#66. The function of the photographer is to help people understand the world around them.
Sid Grossman
#67. It's more important for a photographer to have very good shoes, than to have a very good camera
Sebastiao Salgado
#68. 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
#69. [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
#70. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
Susan Sontag
#71. 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
#72. The photographer is a manipulator of light; photography is a manipulation of light.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
#73. I read like a crazy person, I play the piano, and I'm a photographer. I always say my photography keeps me sane. I spend a lot of time in the darkroom. It's a very solitary, quiet life when I'm not working.
Alaina Huffman
#74. And if a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it's as though I've neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up. I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible.
Richard Avedon
#75. Photographers feel guilty that all they do for a living is press a button.
Andy Warhol
#76. Photography is a very lonely medium. There's a kind of beautiful loneliness in voyeurism. And that's why I'm a photographer.
Alec Soth
#77. The possibility of one particular photographer's pictures lying around the corner is never realized until the photographer is there. It's one of the enigmas of photography.
Alex Webb
#80. Words of wisdom for every photographer: 'Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking'. So said Goethe.
Bill Jay
#81. What is a portrait good for, unless it shows just how the subject was seen by the painter? In the old days before photography came in a sitter had a perfect right to say to the artist: "Paint me just as I am." Now if he wishes absolute fidelity he can go to the photographer and get it.
Aubrey Beardsley
#82. One reason I was interested in photography was to get away from the preciousness of the art object.
Cindy Sherman
#83. It's like a malicious person lifting a photograph from the developing chemicals too early, and then pronouncing the photographer incompetent.
John Taylor Gatto
#84. To me photography can be simultaneously both a record and a mirror or window of self-expression the camera is generally assumed to be unable to depict that which is not visible to the eye and yet, the photographer who wields it well can depict what lies unseen in his memory.
Eikoh Hosoe
#85. Photography has always reminded me of the second child.. trying to prove itself. The fact that it wasn't really considered an art.. that it was considered a craft.. has trapped almost every serious photographer.
Richard Avedon
#86. A photographer went to a socialite party in New York. As he entered the front door, the host said 'I love your pictures - they're wonderful; you must have a fantastic camera.' He said nothing until dinner was finished, then: 'That was a wonderful dinner; you must have a terrific stove.
Sam Haskins
#87. Why you like photography so much? Because it's just the camera and me showing everyone else what we can see. It's telling stories.
Lindsey Kelk
#88. When I first started making photo pieces it wasn't with the idea of a commitment to the medium. I didn't think I would have to become a photographer to make my photographs. I recall that anything could be used as material for art in that era. Photography was just one more thing.
William Wegman
#89. Ultimately success or failure in photographing people depends on the photographer's ability to understand his fellow man.
Edward Weston
#91. If you are out there shooting, things will happen for you. If you're not out there, you'll only hear about it.
Jay Maisel
#92. Most of the information we now get is through television and is mutilated. Photography offers the opportunity to spend much more time on a topic. It's relatively cheaper medium, and can allow a photographer really to live in another place, show another reality, get closer to the truth.
Sebastiao Salgado
#93. One day I was speculating on how I would like to look back on life and I decided I wanted to feel that I was a photographer rather than a teacher. As simple as that.
David Hurn
#94. Everyone is a photographer now, remember. That's the great thing about photography.
Martin Parr
#95. "Do not call yourself an "artist-photographer" and make "artist-painters" and "artist-sculptors" laugh; call yourself a photographer and wait for artists to call you brother."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#96. Photography starts with the projection of the photographer, his understanding of life and himself into the picture.
Lisette Model
#97. The job of the photographer, in my view, is not to catalogue indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope. This is not to say that he is unconcerned with the truth.
Robert Adams
#98. 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
#99. Timothy O'Sullivan was, it seems to me, the greatest of the photographers because he understood nature first as architecture.
Robert Adams
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