Top 100 Photography The Quotes
#1. 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
#2. I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.
Ken Burns
#3. Photography - the new, rapid, concrete reflector of the world - should surely undertake to show the world from all vantage points, and to develop people's capacity to see from all sides. (1928)
Alexander Rodchenko
#4. 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
#5. Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it.
Kenneth Clark
#6. I got really excited about finding new ways of using video, and the immediacy is different, in a way, than painting and photography. The creativity comes with the editing. You can layer and cut and paste. I really love that it's like another form of making my smaller collages but in video form.
Mickalene Thomas
#7. In photography, the issue of the integration of form and content is exceptionally difficult because of the widely held belief that photographs must be a kind of vicarious experience of the subject itself.
Peter C Bunnell
#8. Nothing proves the truth of surrealism so much as photography. The Zeiss lens has unexpected faculties of surprise!
Salvador Dali
#9. I'm not modest about myself. I know for a fact that I am good. But good in the sense that I can put things together. I expound vociferously to students of architecture and photography, the significance of design. A photograph is a design in which you assemble thoughts in your mind.
Julius Shulman
#10. [Dada is] perfectly kindhearted malice, alongside exact photography the only legitimate pictorial form of communication and balance in shared experience.
Raoul Hausmann
#11. If it doesn't have ambiguity, don't bother to take it. I love that, that aspect of photography - the mendacity of photography - it's got to have some kind of peculiarity in it or it's not interesting to me.
Sally Mann
#12. I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it.
Lorrie Moore
#13. Thanks to photography, the eye grew accustomed to anticipate what it should see and to see it; and it learned not to see nonexistent things which, hitherto, it had seen so clearly.
Paul Valery
#14. 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
#15. In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a Leitmotiv.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#16. 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
#17. I approached photography the only way that I knew how to approach anything: as a job. I would get up, photograph all morning, stop and have lunch, and then, photograph all afternoon. I didn't think that I had to wait for some inspiration.
Thomas Roma
#18. The simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression ... In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a leitmotif.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#19. When I was at college, the idea of fashion was more immediate to me, whereas art photography, the depth of it, was a different thing. Storytelling - fanciful storytelling - can only be told through fashion photography. It's the perfect way to play with fantasy and dreams.
Tim Walker
#20. The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge - the line that separates in from out - and on the shapes that are created by it.
John Szarkowski
#21. There is 3 key things for good photography: the camera,lighting and ... Photoshop
Tyra Banks
#22. 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
#23. The key is to integrate our art into our life, not the other way around.
Brooks Jensen
#24. Photography gives you the opportunity to use your sensibility and everything you are to say something about and be part of the world around you. In this way, you might discover who you are, and with a little luck, you might discover something much larger than yourself.
Peter Lindbergh
#25. 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
#27. 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
#28. I'm not a religious person. The language of photography is symbolic.
Sebastiao Salgado
#29. People who wouldn't think of taking a sieve to the well to draw water fail to see the folly in taking a camera to make a painting.
Edward Weston
#30. Leica, schmeica. The camera doesn't make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But you have to see.
Ernst Haas
#31. 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
#32. Ultimately success or failure in photographing people depends on the photographer's ability to understand his fellow man.
Edward Weston
#33. 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
#34. Two factors thus emerge as requisites of success in the field of creative photography. First, the subject must be photogenic. Second, its re-creation in a photograph must be based upon technical knowledge, guided and supported by artsitic inspiration.
Andreas Feininger
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. It's good to be around people who see [photography] as a reasonable enterprise when everyone in the neighborhood may think it's ridiculous. (On the benefit of teaching photography)
John Divola
#38. 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
#39. The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.
Susan Sontag
#40. Not only does a lens distort forms, but the ordinary plate makes an unholy mess of colour in its tone relations. Yellow becomes black, and blue white. Black sunflowers against a white sky - what a travesty!
Walter J. Phillips
#41. Faces in the everyday impress us as hives of subtlety. That impression must be sharpened in photography, which discloses only a microsecond of the face's behaviour, immersed in a social process.
Max Kozloff
#42. 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
#43. I like to think that the music is a mixture of personal experiences mixed with photography and movies.
Sune Rose Wagner
#44. In a still photograph you basically have two variables, where you stand and when you press the shutter. That's all you have.
Henry Wessel Jr.
#45. 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
#46. I began to see cinema as the perfect combination of so many wonderful art forms - painting, photography, music, dance, theater.
James Gray
#47. Best wide-angle lens? Two steps backward. Look for the 'ah-ha'.
Ernst Haas
#48. I like the stories. I like the narratives that you get in fashion photography. And I like what the clothes do to the body - the patterns and stripes and all of that.
Chantal Joffe
#49. 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
#50. At exhibition openings always praise the chicken for laying eggs; you can wring its neck later.
Bill Jay
#51. 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
#52. Every day I am aware of the flow and constant change; perhaps I am at the edge of discovering what more our bodies might be able to teach about the spirit of life. At least, I am always exploring and trying to understand our relationship to the whole universe.
Ruth Bernhard
#53. The photographer is a manipulator of light; photography is a manipulation of light.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
#54. 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
#55. As a young person, and I know it's hard to believe that I was shy, but you could take your camera, and it would take you to places: it was like having a friend, like having someone to go out with and look at the world. I would do things with a camera I wouldn't do normally if I was just by myself.
Annie Leibovitz
#56. The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.
Susan Sontag
#57. Photography has always been a passion of mine, but I began to study light field photography when I was in the Ph.D. program at Stanford University.
Ren Ng
#58. I never took it upon myself to change the world. And those contemporaries of mine who were going around falling for the idea that they were going to bring down the United States government and make a new world were just asses to me.
Walker Evans
#59. Probably one of the worst things that happened to photography is that cameras have viewfinders.
John Baldessari
#60. With light field technology, there is a huge opportunity for creativity in photography that hasn't been available in the past.
Ren Ng
#61. 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
#62. In the act of love, as in photography, there is a form of life and a kind of slow death,
Nobuyoshi Araki
#64. My father was a psycho-analyst and I think that fact was very influential on my development as an artist. Trying to search beneath the surface of things for an unexpected sense of mystery.
Gregory Crewdson
#65. If acting doesn't work out, I plan to do food photography and just eat my way through the entire world. I'm a big foodie, and if I could make some career out of it, that would be fantastic.
Jamie Chung
#66. 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
#67. [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
#68. You had to be aware that I saw that photography was a mere episode in the history of the optical projection and when the chemicals ended, meaning the picture was fixed by chemicals, we were in a new era.
David Hockney
#69. The thing that's fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.
Imogen Cunningham
#70. A camera can get you close without the burden of commitment. It's a nifty device that way, a magical passport into people's lives with no permanent strings attached.
Nina Berman
#71. The first picture of his I ever saw was during a lecture at the Rhyl camera club. I was 16 and the speaker was Emrys Jones. He projected the picture upside down. Deliberately, to disregard the subject matter to reveal the composition. It's a lesson I've never forgotten.
Philip Jones Griffiths
#72. What inspires me still: travel, art, photography, my kids, the places I haven't been to yet.
Jillian Barberie
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. In photography, you always have both the medium and the depicted subject at the same time.
Thomas Ruff
#77. People are always trying to find the next groovy thing, and it hasn't gone back to painting ... I'd like it to go back to painting. I'm sick of all this photography and video. There's so much of it, it's almost annoying.
Cindy Sherman
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. I was twenty when I discovered war and photography. I can't say that I wanted to bear witness and change the world. I had no good moral reasons: I just loved adventure, I loved the poetry of war, the poetry of chaos, and I found that there was a kind of grace in weaving between the bullets.
Luc Delahaye
#81. By some special graciousness of fate I am deposited - as all good photographers like to be - in the right place at the right time. Go into it as young as possible. Bring all the asset you have and play to win.
Margaret Bourke-White
#82. The camera points both ways. In expressing the subject you also express yourself ...
Freeman Patterson
#83. Sometimes one waits too long for the perfect moment before snapping the picture. You never realize that you needed was to change perspective.
Miguel Syjuco
#84. This is the gift of the landscape photograph, that the heart finds a place to stand.
Emmet Gowin
#85. He's got a box with a demon in it that draws pictures," said Rincewind shortly. "Do what the madman says and he will give you gold.
Terry Pratchett
#86. 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
#87. People think because it's photography it's not worth as much, and because it's a woman artist, you're still not getting as much - there's still definitely that happening. I'm still really competitive when it comes to, I guess, the male painters and male artists. I still think that's really unfair.
Cindy Sherman
#88. The function of the photographer is to help people understand the world around them.
Sid Grossman
#89. The lions taught me photography. They taught me patience and the sense of beauty, a beauty that penetrates you.
Yann Arthus-Bertrand
#90. My interest in photography did not begin with books or mentors, or with any burning desire to see the world through a camera. It evolved from an intense devotion to mountains and wilderness that eventually shaped all the parts of my life and brought them together.
Galen Rowell
#91. The word "photography" can be interpreted as "writing with light" or "drawing with light." Some photographers are producing beautiful photographs by drawing with light.. Some other photographers are trying to tell something with their photographs. They are writing with light ...
Philippe Halsman
#92. Technology has eliminated the basement darkroom and the whole notion of photography as an intense labor of love for obsessives and replaced them with a sense of immediacy and instant gratification.
Joe McNally
#93. Photography, to me, is the dewdrop that reflects my inner and outer worlds simultaneously.
Raghubir Singh
#94. In the end, photography for me is just an excuse to get to know the world.
Graciela Iturbide
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. The desert ... may serve better as the backdrop for the problematic relationship between man and the environment. The human struggle, the successes ... both noble and foolish, are readily apparent in the desert. Symbols and relationships seem to arise that stand for the human condition itself.
Richard Misrach
#98. I'm not a social person. Not that I'm not at ease. I'm pretty good, but it bores me. Not the people, but the whole thing. What for? It's not very productive. I only want to do what I have to do: fashion, photography, books. And that's all.
Karl Lagerfeld
#99. 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
#100. 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
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