Top 100 Quotes About In Photography
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. Perishability in a photograph is important in a picture. If a photograph looks perishable we say, "Gee, I'm glad I have that moment."
John Loengard
#5. 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
#6. Ultimately success or failure in photographing people depends on the photographer's ability to understand his fellow man.
Edward Weston
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. I'm so drawn to photography because you can convey a complex story in a single frame.
Gia Coppola
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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.
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. With light field technology, there is a huge opportunity for creativity in photography that hasn't been available in the past.
Ren Ng
#22. In the act of love, as in photography, there is a form of life and a kind of slow death,
Nobuyoshi Araki
#23. [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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. I took courses at USC in film editing and art direction and photography when I was still in high school.
Ray Harryhausen
#27. 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
#28. Good films are not made by accident, nor is good photography. You can have good things happen, on occasion, by accident that can be applied at that moment in a film, but your craft isn't structured around such things, except in beer commercials.
Gordon Willis
#29. 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
#30. In photography, you always have both the medium and the depicted subject at the same time.
Thomas Ruff
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. The camera points both ways. In expressing the subject you also express yourself ...
Freeman Patterson
#35. I am interested in computers and technology, and art, photography, and design.
William Landay
#36. 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
#37. 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
#39. I don't know if I can articulate how I feel. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would make it here.
Keith Carter
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. In the end, photography for me is just an excuse to get to know the world.
Graciela Iturbide
#43. One of my passions is photography. I always carry a camera in my bag whenever I travel. I always take pictures wherever I go, and some of them end up being really crazy ones.
Sunidhi Chauhan
#44. 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
#45. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. Photography captures a moment in time. Art captures time in a moment.
Joyce Wycoff
#50. One thing I would never photograph is a dog lying in the mud.
Diane Arbus
#51. 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
#52. I know the expression love bloomed is metaphorical, but in my heart in this moment, there is one badass flower, captured in time-lapse photography, going from bud to wild radiant blossom in ten seconds flat.
Jandy Nelson
#53. 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
#54. In short, [photography] is a matter of turning loneliness into thoughts.
Shomei Tomatsu
#55. Oh my goodness gracious, what you can buy off the Internet in terms of overhead photography. A trained ape can know an awful lot of what is going on in this world, just by punching on his mouse, for a relatively modest cost.
Donald Rumsfeld
#56. Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.
Steven Pinker
#57. In the world of photography, you get to share a captured moment with other people.
James Wilson
#58. Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity.
Will Self
#59. Without my photography life would be boring. Photography adds an extra dimension to my life. Somehow it confirms my place in the world
Rennie Ellis
#60. 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
#61. We are drowning in images. Photography is used as a propaganda tool, which serves to sell products and ideas. I use the same approach to show aspects of reality.
Martin Parr
#62. As an allegorical art, then, photography would represent our desire to fix the transitory, the ephemeral, in a stable and stabilizing image.
Craig Owens
#63. Although I get a lot of ideas from things that have happened in my life, I see the final product as a place where my imagination meets my experience. What I love about photography is that nothing is really as it seems.
Laurel Nakadate
#64. 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
#65. There are two dirty words in photography, one is art, the other is good taste
Helmut Newton
#66. Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
Susan Sontag
#67. 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
#68. For the first time in the history of photography, we can study the real-time production of snapshot making - globally! (On Flickr and other photosharing websites)
Joachim Schmid
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. To sum up - i f you want to be more creat ive, star t loving yoursel f enough to give
yoursel f permission to fai l . In fact , bet ter yet , don' t even wor ry about winning or
losing. Just DO.
Scott Bourne
#72. Photography has become an outstanding and indispensable means of propaganda in the revolutionary struggle.
Willi Munzenberg
#73. In the beginning of my photography I controlled everything: rearranging the room, lighting it, and telling people what to do and where to put their hands. By the last project, I was basically totally at the mercy of serendipity.
Philip-Lorca DiCorcia
#74. In photography one should surely proceed from essence of the object and attempt to represent it with photographic terms alone.
Albert Renger-Patzsch
#75. 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
#76. You know exactly what I think of photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable. (In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz)
Marcel Duchamp
#77. 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
#79. But she never knew what it was like to walk away from the thing she had most wanted. Years later she would say, Photography allowed me to make the world and be in the world.
Whitney Otto
#80. Very few people, thank God, look like the pictures of them which are published in the papers and the weekly magazines ...
Ilka Chase
#81. For me, the strength of photography lies in its ability to evoke humanity. If war is an attempt to negate humanity, then photography can be perceived as the opposite of war.
James Nachtwey
#82. 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
#83. The fact that few painter-fine-artists used photography in their work made it appealing.
Edward Ruscha
#84. I was an artistic dilettante for a while, in photography and collage and the visual arts.
Thomas F. Wilson
#85. Nowadays shots are created in post-production, on computers. It's not really photography.
Mary Ellen Mark
#86. Photography could have been invented in color. Colors existed.
Jean-Luc Godard
#87. I profoundly believe in - and teach - the proposition that photography is inherently a fiction-making process. Don't speak to me of the document; I don't really believe in it particularly now. A picture is not the world, but a new thing.
Tod Papageorge
#88. I got into photography because of the immediacy of the medium. I used to sit in front of a canvas for weeks trying to create something. Now I can see the image right away.
Mario Sorrenti
#89. Just like zillions of children, album covers educated and informed me, and certainly did I later transpose organically, rather than by intent, those principles both in fashion design and photography.
Hedi Slimane
#90. 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
#91. When you take a photo, you often take your own reality into your camera - the reality that you shaped in your mind - and not the real reality over there, whatever it is!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#92. One knows that frontal and/or profile photography is torn to pieces ... Inversely, what remains of the photograph must be seen as a fragment coming to fill a gap in the drawing.
Jean-Francois Lyotard
#94. I shutter to think how many people are underexposed and lacking depth in this field.
Rick Steves
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. Filmmaking became a possible way for me to combine my interest in photography and in gathering stories, as well as my interest in journalism and political science and international relations.
Joshua Marston
#100. There are religions in which the representation of the world is banned as an usurpation of the power of a God, creator of all things. It is very possible that photography is a trick of the devil and each shot is a sin.
Joan Fontcuberta
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
