Top 100 Photography With Quotes
#1. My enthusiasm for joining the New York Film Academy is predicated on my personal explorations into video as well as a sense of responsibility to share my extended experience of photography with committed students in both mediums.
Ralph Gibson
#3. I think photojournalism is documentary photography with a purpose.
W. Eugene Smith
#4. I came to photography with the desire to conquer this machine, the camera, and make it my slave. Instead, I have now a respect for it and all machines as expanders of my awareness.
Todd Walker
#5. The importance of immobility and silence to photographic authority, the nonfilmic nature of this authority, leads me to some remarks on the relationship of photography with death. Immobility and silence are not only two objective aspects of death, they are also its main symbols, they figure it.
Christian Metz
#6. In stamping photography with the patent of realism, society does nothing but confirm itself in the tautological certainty that an image of reality that conforms to its own representation of objectivity is truly objective.
Pierre Bourdieu
#7. I began photographing in 1946. Before that, I was a painter and drawer, with my mother and father's support. They were a bit pissed when I went into photography. They thought photographers were guys who took pictures at weddings.
Harold Feinstein
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Photography is like a river with a thousand streams that never converge.
Massimo Vitali
#12. I like to think that the music is a mixture of personal experiences mixed with photography and movies.
Sune Rose Wagner
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. With light field technology, there is a huge opportunity for creativity in photography that hasn't been available in the past.
Ren Ng
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. All along I've had an ambivalent relationship to photography - but as to whether I thought it an art form, or a craft, or a technique, well, I've always been taken with Henry Geldzahler's answer to that question when he said, I thought it was a hobby.
David Hockney
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. If we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear - but the closest scrutiny of the photogenic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented.
Edgar Allan Poe
#27. In the world of photography, you get to share a captured moment with other people.
James Wilson
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Photography forces one out into the world, interacting with people and the environment. It flexes all those right brain, spatially-adept muscles.
Deborah Copaken Kogan
#32. In photography one should surely proceed from essence of the object and attempt to represent it with photographic terms alone.
Albert Renger-Patzsch
#33. When I started working in film, I loved photography, I loved the image, I loved telling the story within a frame, but as I started playing around with film and video, it was like, 'Oh my god.' You just have so much more to play with.
Lynn Shelton
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens.
Franz Kafka
#37. As I progressed further with my project, it became obvious that it was really unimportant where I chose to photograph. The particular place simply provided an excuse to produce work ... you can only see what you are ready to see - what mirrors your mind at that particular time.
George A Tice
#38. I'm really into my photography and am trying to catch up with digital generation - I was used to the old 35mm cameras.
David Suchet
#40. With photography, you zero in; you put a lot of energy into short moments, and then you go on to the next thing.
Robert Mapplethorpe
#41. Photography is not only drawing with light, though light is the indispensable agent of its being. It is modeling or sculpturing with light, to reproduce the plastic form of natural objects. It is painting with light ...
Berenice Abbott
#42. With photography, I like to create a fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society's natural prejudice and giving this a twist.
Martin Parr
#43. Photography is a craft. Anyone can learn a craft with normal intelligence and application. To take it beyond the craft is something else. That's when magic comes in. And I don't know that there's any explanation for that.
Elliott Erwitt
#44. During photography's first decades, exposure times were quite long ... So, similar to the drawings produced with the help of a camera obscura, which depicted reality as static and immobile, early photographs represented the world as stable, eternal, unshakable.
Lev Manovich
#45. Photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness.
Andre Bazin
#46. 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
#47. I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us, which can mold us, but which can also be affected by us. A balance must be established between these two worlds - the one inside us and the one outside us.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#48. Our experience with knowledge, the way we know things, is not that neat. It doesn't fit into a grand narrative, the way we've been taught to read.
Richard Misrach
#49. I felt that photography ought to start with and remain faithful to the appearance of the world, and in so doing record contradictions. The greatest pictures would then ... find wholeness in the torn world.
Robert Adams
#50. There is no closed figure in nature. Every shape participates with another. No one thing is independent of another, and one thing rhymes with another, and light gives them shape.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#51. Humans abstract and record information in five major ways: with writing, mathematical notation, painting/photography/videography, maps, and clocks - that is, we can abstract and record verbal, numerical, visual, spatial, and temporal information.
William J. Bernstein
#52. Nothing is more hateful to me than photography coated with gimmicks, poses and false effects. Therefore let me speak the truth in all honesty about our age and the people of our age
August Sander
#53. I believe it was probably less than ten minutes that went by from the invention of photography to the point where people realized that they could lie with photographs.
Errol Morris
#54. Photography freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#55. Photography has become a small world with so many jealous people. You do a story and then a lot of people try to do the same thing.
Sebastiao Salgado
#56. Photography has always been a major part of my vision: my excuse for meddling with what the world looks like.
Robert Rauschenberg
#57. I don't think science is necessarily incompatible with mystical or spiritual sensibilities. I often weigh them equally in my thinking, which sometimes finds itself into the work.
Keith Carter
#58. Science strives for answers, but art is happy with a good question.
James Turrell
#59. Nothing seemed to me more appropriate than to project an image of our time with absolute fidelity to nature by means of photography.
August Sander
#60. Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.
Arnold Newman
#61. A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.
Annie Leibovitz
#62. I think probably something big can be done with cameras, I'm not saying, er, I'm saying chemical photography's finished, that means you can't have a Cartier Bresson again, you need never believe pictures.
David Hockney
#63. Photography is the mirror, more faithful than any actual mirror, in which we witness at every age, our own aging. The actual mirror accompanies us through time, thoughtfully and treacherously; it changes with us, so that we appear not to change.
Christian Metz
#64. The trouble with flowers is that invariably, when I'm ready to photograph them, they are not in season.
Anne Geddes
#65. You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see If with the camera you can make others see it - that is photography.
Ernst Haas
#66. On many days my primary artistic struggle is, in fact, photography because it is harder to do good work with that. I see myself as an observer of the world who has a strong drive to testify, which I can do because I have the privilege of living in New York with enough food to eat and shelter.
Teju Cole
#67. It is my hope that photography may fall in line with all the other arts and with her infinite possibilities, do things strange and more fascinating than the most fantastic dreams.
Alvin Langdon Coburn
#68. I have problems with a lot of photography, particularly street photography and photojournalism - objectifying the other, finding the contempt and exoticism that you might feel within yourself or toward yourself and projecting it out to others. There can be an abusive power to photography, too.
Barbara Kruger
#69. A fact about photography: we can look at people's faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states - for a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.
Adam Gopnik
#70. 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
#71. Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.
John Berger
#72. Photography starts with the projection of the photographer, his understanding of life and himself into the picture.
Lisette Model
#73. No, you don't shoot things. You capture them. Photography means painting with light. And that's what you do. You paint a picture only by adding light to the things you see.
Katja Michael
#74. You've gotta taste the light, like my friend and fellow shooter Chip Maury says. And when you see light like this, trust me, it's like a strawberry sundae with sprinkles.
Joe McNally
#75. I do not object to retouching, dodging or accentuation as long as they do not interfere with the natural qualities of photographic technique.
Alfred Stieglitz
#76. We have - through a hundred years of photography and two decades of film - been enormously enriched ... We may say we see the world with entirely different eyes.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
#78. I consider myself fortunate that photography exists, because otherwise I'd be stuck in the tragedy of ephemeralness that can come with installation art.
Sandy Skoglund
#79. There are many reasons why photography does not attract the social and cultural attention it deserves. I would add one more which has received scant attention: it does not make a lot of noise ... Perhaps photography would be more appreciated if camera shutters fired with the sound of a .357 Magnum.
Bill Jay
#80. I earnestly advise women of artistic tastes to train for the unworked field of modern photography. It seems to be especially adapted to them, and the few who have entered it are meeting with gratifying and profitable success. (1898)
Gertrude Kasebier
#81. Moreover, photography has made it possible to fix these images and now provides us with a permanent record of each observed spectrum, which can be measured out at any time.
Pieter Zeeman
#82. So-called 'realist' photography does not capture the 'what is.' Instead, it is preoccupied with what should not be, like the reality of suffering for example.
Jean Baudrillard
#83. No amount of toying with shades of print or with printing papers will transform a commonplace photograph into anything other than a commonplace photograph.
Bill Brandt
#84. The painter ... will find [photography] a rapid way of making collections of studies he could otherwise obtain only with much time and trouble and, whatever his talents might be, in a far less perfect manner.
Paul Delaroche
#85. I admire photographers who can take much more ordinarily subject matter and make it transcend that ordinariness, so that it becomes something else fresh and new. It opens this doorway. I really admire people who can do that with photography.
Andy Summers
#86. Poetry at least in my own life, is really about your own mortality. Everything in poetry makes me think of my mortality. It is not a dark thing in life; it prepares you for the graceful things that happen in your life. It gives me a license to make any kind of picture I want with great courage.
Keith Carter
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. Photography is no longer a love affair with the beauty of reality.
Peter Lindbergh
#90. My friend who I went to boarding school with was interested in photography. He insisted that I buy a camera and marched me downtown.
William Eggleston
#91. I like the idea that the sacred photo framing process is equally violatible and I think that's partly a carryover from the way I deal with structures to the way I deal with photography.
Gordon Matta-Clark
#92. There's this idea that photography is a kind of testimony and therefore we're forbidden to tell lies with it. I think that's nonsense. Photography isn't testimony.
Frank Horvat
#93. Photography suits the temper of this age - of active bodies and minds. It is a perfect medium for one whose mind is teeming with ideas, imagery, for a prolific worker who would be slowed down by painting or sculpting, for one who sees quickly and acts decisively, accurately.
Edward Weston
#94. Photographs are so loaded with information. They're remarkable. As I said, you get both the tree and the forest.
Lee Friedlander
#95. I've been working with photography for many years.
Leonard Nimoy
#96. When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.
Ansel Adams
#97. I think that 'Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance' was mentally taxing, if only because I had to go to a Christmas party shortly after I had wrapped photography in Romania at two in the morning as the Ghost Rider. The invitation had a Christmas ornament on it with Ghost Rider's face on it as a tree.
Nicolas Cage
#98. With flowers the sex is up-front and x-rated.
Harold Davis
#99. 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
#100. Photography is, by its nature, exploitative. It's whether you use this process with a sense of responsibility or not. I feel that I do so. My conscience is clear.
Martin Parr
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