Top 100 Photography's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Photography's like this baby that needs to be fed all the time. It's always hungry.
Annie Leibovitz
#3. Photography's about the surface, what's happening at the top of the sea. Literature's about all the stuff below.
Max Pam
#4. 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
#5. One of art photography's most vigorous enterprises
[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate
but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.
Susan Sontag
#6. Photography's vaunted capture of a moment in time is the seizure and freezing of presence. It is the image of simultaneity, of the way that everything within a given space at a given moment is present to everything else; it is a declaration of the seamless integrity of the real.
Rosalind E. Krauss
#7. My photography is very European. In America, I always get the sense that people are comforted by understanding what they're looking at. Photography's quite clear here [in the U.S.], it's very well-explained. My photography's perhaps not as well-explained.
Anton Corbijn
#8. Photography's 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent moving furniture.
Gregory Heisler
#9. Photography's central sense of purpose and aesthetic: the precise and lucid description of significant fact.
John Szarkowski
#10. 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
#11. Photography's potential as a great image-maker and communicator is really no different from the same potential in the best poetry where familiar, everyday words, placed within a special context, can soar above the intellect and touch subtle reality in a unique way.
Paul Caponigro
#12. I adore [photography's] uneasy mix of fact and fiction - its dubious claim to truth - its status as history.
Eleanor Antin
#13. To me, the magic of photography, per se, is that you can capture an instant of a second that couldn't exist before and couldn't exist after. It's almost like a cowboy that draws his gun. You draw a second before or after, you miss and you're dead - not them. To me, photography's always like that.
Mario Testino
#14. [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
#15. Photography's central role is to be the absolute medium of the day. It is fantastic that there is no longer any technical intimidation.
Martin Parr
#16. As every artist who has used the method knows - photography's a loyal slave and a tyrannical master.
Robert Genn
#17. I always say that photography's closest cousin is poetry because of the way it sparks your imagination and leaves gaps for the viewer to fill in.
Alec Soth
#18. Photography's a case of keeping all the pores of the skin open, as well as the eyes. A lot of photographers today think that by putting on the uniform, the fishing vest, and all the Nikons, that that makes them a photographer. But it doesn't. It's not just seeing. It's feeling.
Don McCullin
#19. I think we seem to remember things in still pictures. I never gave up on painting. When they said painting was dead, I just thought, Well, that's all about photography, and photography's not that interesting, and it's changing anyway.
David Hockney
#20. Photography's future is infinite and bright. It's growing exponentially, so that's great, but for me as a practitioner, that exponential growth makes it even more problematic. And so for me, it's got me more engaged with storytelling.
Alec Soth
#21. Photography's history is bound to the mistake, to the accident.
Taryn Simon
#22. Photography's ability to blur truth and fiction is one of its most compelling qualities. But when misused ... this ambiguity can have severe, even lethal consequences ... Photography's ambiguity, beautiful in one context, can be devastating in another.
Taryn Simon
#23. The meaning of quality in photography's best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system.
Walker Evans
#24. 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
#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
#26. Ultimately success or failure in photographing people depends on the photographer's ability to understand his fellow man.
Edward Weston
#27. Did I express my personality? I think that's quite unimportant because it's not people's selves but what they have to say about life that's important.
Paul Strand
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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.
#33. 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
#34. I was a Catholic boy, I went to church every Sunday. A church has a certain magic and mystery for a child. It still shows in how I arrange things. It's always little altars.
Robert Mapplethorpe
#35. 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
#36. If it makes you laugh, if it makes you cry, if it rips out your heart, that's a good picture.
Eddie Adams
#37. [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
#38. 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
#39. The thing that's fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.
Imogen Cunningham
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. I'm designing a seductive frame to attract an audience to a subject they would otherwise ignore. And that's what I do in all of my photography - give a stage to things that wouldn't normally receive that stage.
Taryn Simon
#43. It's more important for a photographer to have very good shoes, than to have a very good camera
Sebastiao Salgado
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. IT'S a pitfall to have a definition of photography,
Jeff Wall
#50. 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
#51. Sometimes it's not how much light you use to get an effect, it's how
little you use and still make it work. There are a lot of rules to be
broken in photography, and you've got to have courage.
James Wong Howe
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#60. Everything I do, it's a bit painterly. I like being surrounded by objects, mostly on paper. I like the images. I like the painting. I like good photography. It's something that makes me an emotional connection, and I feel comfortable around it.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. I like photography as a recording device. It's the best possible two-dimensional representation of 3D living things that we have.
Andrew Zuckerman
#65. What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that's gone forever, impossible to reproduce.
Karl Lagerfeld
#66. 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
#67. Photography has fooled the world. There's no more convincing fraud. Its images are nothing but the expression of the invisible man working behind the camera. They are not reality, they form part of the language of culture.
Edmundo Desnoes
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. The most important part of fashion photography, for me, is not the models; it's not the clothes. It's that you are responsible for defining what a woman today is. That, I think, is my job.
Peter Lindbergh
#72. 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
#73. My introduction to photography and a lot of how I developed aesthetically was through '50s and early-'60s fashion magazines like Harper's Bazaar and Vogue.
Patti Smith
#74. Nowadays shots are created in post-production, on computers. It's not really photography.
Mary Ellen Mark
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. For example, Michael Mann's film Collateral - there is certain kinds of stories that lend themselves to digital photography. Some things are very raw stories that digital photography kind of lends itself to.
Matthew Modine
#78. 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
#79. I would say that the emblematic photographic image is a picture from inside a room looking out. I think this defines photography. It's the metaphor for the notion of first sight. What one saw first.
Robert Polidori
#80. Pictures you have taken have an influence on those that you are going to make. That's life!
John Sexton
#81. My work is my language and I don't discuss it very easily. It's difficult for me to verbalize my feelings, or to intellectualize my work. In fact, it used to annoy me when Ansel Adams and Paul Strand yak-yak-yakked about what photography meant, and I told them so.
Brett Weston
#82. An artist's job is to inspire, from the Latin inspirare: to breathe into. The primary function of art is to inspire new thought shaped by emotions using the creative mediums we master - be it painting, music, design, craft, or photography.
Anonymous
#83. I could ramble on forever, I just love photography. It's my passion, it drives my family crazy. I live it and breathe it.
Russell James
#84. There's something really magical about trying to see things in new ways that go beyond, in some sense, the biological human experience. Light-field photography, too, goes beyond the human experience because our eyes work like conventional cameras.
Ren Ng
#85. To me, photography is 90% a retrospective experience. There's the part of pursuing the image, and exposing the film, but once you make the exposure, you're always looking backwards in time. I like that aspect of photography.
John Sexton
#86. It began when I was so ill that there was a good chance of dying. I promised myself that if I survived I would never again pander to a magazine's requests or follow the ideas of art directors. I would only make images which were personal, which arose out of my own life.
Helmut Newton
#87. By shooting the darkest areas three zones lighter, you turned a black, lifeless max black zone 0 into a zone 3.
I think, in life, most of us did this all the time.
A.S. King
#88. I like to work in the real world, so I do a lot of searching or just simple looking. But I'm not above tweaking reality and making something up. I don't think there are any rules in art. It's not so much what you see as it is the significance you, the artist, see in it.
Keith Carter
#89. It's up to us as photographers to give voice to the natural world.
Frans Lanting
#90. I think photographers are too polite. There is not enough anger in photography; it's pretty much trivialized.
Duane Michals
#91. His Holiness [the Dalai Lama] has told me, urgently and repeatedly, that he thinks my photographs are crap. His exact words were, 'These photos are of poor quality. Why is there no sharp focus? There is no clarity!' I said, 'But your Holiness, it's Goyaesque.' And he said, 'No! It's out of focus!'
Richard Gere
#92. I did take my camera along, as I felt there wouldn't be enough time to draw the things I wanted to do. I did some drawing and did a lot of photography but I was not part of Stryker's outfit at all.
Ben Shahn
#93. I don't think that digital photography is romantic yet. It's not sympathetic the way that film is.
Matthew Modine
#94. Photography for me is not looking, it's feeling. If you can't feel what you're looking at, then you're never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.
Don McCullin
#95. I was always in front of the camera. My mom was really passionate about photography - I have pictures of my whole life. I've always just been in front of my mom's camera, and it's always comfortable to me.
Gigi Hadid
#96. Photography is about freezing a moment in time; McGinley's is about freezing a stage in a lifetime.
Jeffrey Kluger
#97. It's seldom you make a great picture. you have to milk the cow quite a lot to get plenty of milk to make a little cheese.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#98. I just picked up a camera without any kind of ambition to be good or bad. And especially without any ambition to make a living ... My whole freedom working in photography comes because I say to myself, Let's see what is going on in this world. Let's find out. How do these people look?
Lisette Model
#99. It's neither our culture nor our race which
interconnects us. It's Street Photography.
Thomas Leuthard
#100. Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn't look like somebody else's work.
William Klein
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