Quotes About Being A Photographer

#1. I never thought of being a performer, never thought of being a singer, never thought of being a photographer. It's just the trajectory of my work. I go to the medium that serves the vision.

Patti Smith

#2. 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

#3. My father had wanted to be a commercial artist. He got as far as being a photographer in the army in World War II, but he was always a Sunday painter. At a certain point, he gave me his oil paints and I messed around with them, having no idea what I was doing.

David Salle

#4. I fell in love with the darkroom, and that was part of being a photographer at the time. The darkroom was unbelievably sexy. I would spend all night in the darkroom.

Annie Leibovitz

#5. I can get obsessed by anything if I look at it long enough. That's the curse of being a photographer.

Irving Penn

#6. I am always on the go; being a photographer, filmmaker, author and a father, things become stressful, and it is important to find time to escape for a few minutes.

Nigel Barker

#7. I liked the idea of being a photographer, just that you take this one picture of this one thing that'll never happen again - it's a bit weird when you think about it.

Courtney Barnett

#8. I don't think at that time I realized how important it was and how important it was for me to be here and carry on that legacy in our family of being a photographer.

Kim Weston

#9. I fell in love with traveling and thought being a photographer would be an interesting way to travel and make a living.

Peter Menzel

#10. Being a photographer is making people look at what I want them to look at.

Ruth Orkin

#11. I try not to tell students where to shoot, when to shoot, or what to shoot. I feel finding the picture is the most important part of being a photographer. The actual shooting is of lesser importance.

Jay Maisel

#12. Forget about the profession of being a photographer. First be a photographer and maybe the profession will come after.

Christopher Anderson

#13. I started being a photographer because I liked fashion. I liked the idea of dressing up and changing my look. I got earrings, dyed my hair. I would dress like a fashion photo.

Mario Testino

#14. I didn't see any difference between being a photographer or being an artist. I didn't make those boundaries. If someone wants to think it's art, that's great, but I'll let history decide.

David LaChapelle

#15. It's a very weird thing being a photographer.

Danny Lyon

#16. It's weird being a photographer because you really have to divorce yourself from the image.

Ryan McGinley

#17. My dad was actually against me being a photographer. He thought it was a dead-end job and that you end up doing baby pictures and weddings.

Rick Smolan

#18. Being a photographer is like listening to music. If you have a camera, by just living your life you're bound to find some things that are worth taking a picture of. You don't have to be an audiophile to have taste in music. It happens through osmosis.

Christine Elise

#19. The photographer is a thief who chooses what he steals (which, at this stage of the crisis, is a luxury) and does not democratize the image, that is to say, the photographer selects the pictures, a privilege which ought to be granted to the person being photographed.

Subcomandante Marcos

#20. I'm a terrible photographer.I'm not being modest. My photos really are crap. But in a way, the more the photo is crap, the better to paint from.

Chantal Joffe

#21. I'm not a serious photographer like many of my contemporaries. That is to say, I am serious about not being serious.

Elliott Erwitt

#22. Use anger to emotionalize whatever thing you intend to do in life - being a painter, a poet or a photographer

Gordon Parks

#23. You know, my dad wasn't a photographer or filmmaker by profession, but on Sundays, he would take pictures of me and my family or his pals horseback riding, and it was a means of communication and affection, a means of not being so dysfunctional with each other.

Bruce Weber

#24. Once I became a photographer, it stopped me being scared or intimidated by gangs of young men of whatever stripe. Initially, I could hide behind my camera but eventually I came to realize that if I was polite and friendly to them, then they probably would be to me too - a good life lesson.

Derek Ridgers

#25. The public is being spoiled by good technical quality photographs in magazines, on television, in the movies, and they have become bored. The disease of our age is this boredom and a good photographer must successfully combat it. The only way to do this is by invention - by surprise.

Alexey Brodovitch

#26. Being a digital photographer I'm in awe of the older generation of photographers who created all those iconic cinematic style images on film, such as Man Ray's portrait of the photographer Lee Miller.

Paul Walker

#27. In these times aesthetic taste is dismissed as irrelevant. Well, I am perverse, for that reason I am more drawn to it than ever. I have been described as having style, of being a mannered photographer ... it's some people's quarrel with my work and others' fascination.

Deborah Turbeville

#28. Art depends on there being affection in its creator's life and an artist must find ways, like everyone else, to nourish it. A photographer down on his or her knees picturing a dog has found pleasure enough to make many things possible.

Robert Adams

#29. I love storytelling, I love being a visual person, and it just made perfect sense to be an underwater photographer and explore the ocean and work with scientists.

Brian Skerry

#30. Sometimes when I'm being photographed, I hear the voice of this photographer who told me when I was about six while he was taking my school photo that I didn't have a nice smile, and I shouldn't smile in photos.

Brad Goreski

#31. There were some advantages to being a woman photographer. I think women have more empathy with the subject.

Annie Leibovitz

#32. I'd like to briefly state the accomplishment that we expect from a photographer. He must make the person being photographed forget that he has eaten from the tree of knowledge.

Albert Renger-Patzsch

#33. There is a narrative behind every image. I often imagine being able to see the photographer standing behind the camera, or perhaps crouching or running with it.

James Welling

#34. I'm an amateur photographer, apart from being a professional one, and I think maybe my amateur pictures are the better ones.

Elliott Erwitt

#35. In some areas, [Getty Images has] more images than the rest of the market put together. But libraries are being built up at a terrific pace. A photographer in a lifetime will produce maybe a million images, and there are about 15,000 professionals at work out there.

Mark Getty

#36. There's nothing wrong with being a fashion photographer, but it's a bit limited.

David Bailey

#37. I went from being an underpaid ad man to quite a successful photographer in a very short time. Success breeds confidence and as soon as I got properly confident, I developed my own style. After that I never looked back.

Derek Ridgers

#38. You know, the Chinese don't like to be photographed because they believe that a part of their life is being taken away by the photographer. And in a way, they're right. The photographer is trying to get the prettiest moment of a life in his camera.

Bert Stern

#39. None of us is born with the right face. It's a tough job being a portrait photographer.

Imogen Cunningham

#40. The way someone who's being photographed presents himself to the camera, and the effect of the photographer's response on that presence, is what the making of a portrait is all about.

Richard Avedon

#41. Anyone can take a nice picture of something pretty. Being able to show the beauty in ugliness and the interest in tedium - that's what makes you a real photographer.

Becca Mills

#42. I'm not a nice girl; I'm a photographer. (On being told by a Federal Art Project official, after she photographed the Bowery, that a nice girl should not go into such neighborhoods )

Berenice Abbott

#43. You have to focus on what you are doing, not just as a photographer, but as a human being.

Anders Petersen

#44. I was in Florida with Burt Stern, the photographer who shot Marilyn Monroe on the beach with a sweater, and we smoked a joint. The bathing suit kept coming off in the water, and I just ripped it off. I was very comfortable being naked.

Rosanna Arquette

#45. Fantasy isn't something I put into the pictures; I don't try and inject them with a sense of play. But it's about being an honest photographer; a photograph is as much of a mirror of the photographer as it is the subject.

Tim Walker

#46. Think like a photographer. Look at every vignette in your home like it's being shot for a shelter magazine and style accordingly.

Jonathan Adler

#47. Modern Art is being used to index me. Surely it was a source but photographers have influenced Modern Art quite as deeply as they have been influenced, maybe more. Anyway painters don't have a copyright on M. A. We were all born in the same upheaval.

Edward Weston