Top 100 Quotes About Life Photography
#2. In fact, I probably learned more about photography from studying black-and-white photography in those magazines [Look Magazine and LIFE Magazine] than I did from watching movies here. That's the truth.
Vilmos Zsigmond
#3. Truthfully, I don't really think of myself as a photographer. I don't have all the disciplines and knowledge of a person who's spent their life devoted to photography.
Patti Smith
#4. Throughout the history of art it has been art itself - in all its forms - that has inspired art ... today's photographs are so geared to life that one can learn more from them than from life itself.
Van Deren Coke
#5. I can tell you for me it goes on forever. There are some things you can't ever find out. You can't find out in one life either.
Harry Callahan
#6. We could teach photography as a way to make a living, and best of all, somehow to get students to experience for themselves photography as a way of life.
Minor White
#7. My true program is summed up in one word: life. I expect to photograph anything suggested by that word which appeals to me.
Edward Weston
#8. It was the era of photography. This may have influenced us, and played a part in our reaction against anything resembling a snapshot of life. (On the year 1905)
Andre Derain
#9. This recognition, in real life, of a rhythm of surfaces, lines, and values is for me the essence of photography; composition should be a constant of preoccupation, being a simultaneous coalition - an organic coordination of visual elements.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#10. In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding - at a distance, through the medium of photography - other people's pain.
Susan Sontag
#11. Photographers - idiots, of which there are so many - say, "Oh, if only I had a Nikon or a Leica, I could make great photographs." That's the dumbest thing I ever heard in my life. It's nothing but a matter of seeing, and thinking, and interest.
Andreas Feininger
#12. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#13. Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
Wallace Stevens
#14. Does not the very word 'creative' mean to build, to initiate, to give out, to act - rather than to be acted upon, to be subjective? Living photography is positive in its approach, it sings a song of life - not death.
Berenice Abbott
#15. For me photography has been a profession, an avocation. Now it has become a way of life.
Wynn Bullock
#17. Mere exactitude, of which photography and moulage [life casting] are the lowest forms, does not inspire feelings.
Auguste Rodin
#18. Photography is one big scrapbook of your life.
Lisa Jones
#19. If all your life means to you is water running over rocks, then photograph it, but I want to create something that would not have existed without me.
Minor White
#20. Photography turns one and all into fools, including - especially - artists like himself, eager to hunt life and trap as many of its fleeting variables as possible inside a 35 mm frame but doomed to return empty-handed far more often than not.
Richard Woodward
#21. I am just a middle-class farm boy from Dodge City and my grandparents were wheat farmers. I thought painting, acting, directing and photography were all part of being an artist. I have made my money that way. And I have had some fun. It's not been a bad life.
Dennis Hopper
#22. A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is thereby a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.
Ansel Adams
#23. When a person looks at a photograph you've taken, they will always think of themselves, their own life experience. They will relate your photograph to their memories. That interplay is where a picture comes alive and grows into something. They function like invitations.
Jason Fulford
#24. Photography, for me, is a lot like web surfing in real life.
Alec Soth
#25. I love this life. I feel like I am always catching my breath and saying, 'Oh! Will you look at that?' Photography has been my way of bearing witness to the joy I find in seeing the extraordinary in ordinary life. You don't look for pictures. Your pictures are looking for you.
Harold Feinstein
#26. Photography is like life What does it all mean? I don't know - but you get an impression, a feeling. An impression of walking through the street, walking through the park, walking through life. I'm very suspicious of people who say they know what it means.
Leonard Freed
#27. Photography does deal with 'truth' or a kind of superficial reality better than any of the other arts, but it never questions the nature of reality - it simply reproduces reality. And what good is that when the things of real value in life are invisible?
Duane Michals
#28. Jesus would have been one of the best photographers that ever existed. He was always looking at the beauty of people souls. In fact Jesus was constantly making pictures of God in people's life by looking at their souls and exposing them to his light.
Francis Bacon
#29. For me photography is just a way to collect material to realize the ideas in my mind. I get inspired by things around me in my daily life and all kinds of things I see. Every new project is a new challenge and my goal is to realize them as realistic as possible.
Erik Johansson
#30. Photography has always been associated with death. Reality is colorful, yet early photography always took the color out of reality and made it black-and-white. Color is life; black-and-white is death. There was a ghost hidden in the invention of photography.
Nobuyoshi Araki
#31. The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.
Edward Weston
#32. Photography is about savoring life at 1/100th of a second.
Marc Riboud
#33. Sometimes I think, What a man gonna do with all this media publicity, Photos in newspapers, photography in and among the industry, references and contacts when he cannot help a friend, when he has no family life, and not Even a dog to welcome him after work hours!
Himmilicious
#34. Fall in love. Every day. With everything. With life. If you can fall in love, you can be a photographer. I think that is absolutely essential.
Ruth Bernhard
#35. You are lucky if you have one or two epiphanies in your life, particularly a creative one.
Keith Carter
#36. Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure.
Tony Benn
#37. As far as I am concerned, taking photographs is a means of understanding which cannot be separated from other means of visual expression. It is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It is a way of life.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#38. It takes the passage of time before an image of a commonplace subject can be assessed. The great difficulty of what I attempt is seeing beyond the moment; the everydayness of life gets in the way of the eternal.
George A Tice
#40. Of course, I won't be abandoning photography, because it is my life.
Sebastiao Salgado
#41. When we take a picture, we have a negative. We put the right solution on it and, suddenly, the picture comes to life. So what do we do? We take the negative and turn it into a positive.
Madonna Ciccone
#42. When I first came to America there still was Look Magazine and LIFE Magazine, and the photography in those magazines was amazing to look at. They had the best portraits, and their news photography.
Vilmos Zsigmond
#43. I think that any photographer is an investigator. Photography is a pretext to know the world, to know life. To know yourself.
Graciela Iturbide
#44. I don't like the discussions about whether photography is an art. Even though I think that if it would be just a craft I would not have stayed with it all my life.
Josef Sudek
#45. The one thing that is always clear in my mind is that the people, and their stories, and the themes of life that I photograph are always more important to me than the process of photography itself.
Peter Turnley
#46. Art films aren't necessarily photography. It's feeling. If we can capture a feeling of a people, of a way of life, then we made a good picture.
John Cassavetes
#47. [Documentary photography] is unwittingly literary, because it is nothing other than an observation of contemporary life apprehended at the right moment by an artist capable of seizing it. (1928)
Pierre Mac Orlan
#48. I make photographs and still make photographs of the natural environment. It's a love because that was part of my life before I was involved in photography.
John Sexton
#49. If I am lucky, something new and inexplicable often appears in front of my lens. I am always surprised by the mystery of how my best images appear. That excitement and shock of discovery makes my life at these moments a gift.
Joyce Tenneson
#50. I was extremely irritated being photographed for a long time, then I gave up caring. Photography is a nauseating cliche, but there is a lot to it. You can tell so much about a person from it. You are exaggerating the consciousness. It's life-thickening, photography.
Peter Beard
#51. To photograph people is to obligate them in some way to face things they weren't expecting to.
Susana Fortes
#52. The authentic thing is to follow your heart, your instincts, your emotions. If you located yourself in an idea, your life would be lived very sadly.
Emmet Gowin
#53. My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.
Steve McCurry
#54. I think there's a deep impulse in most humans to do creative stuff, whether that's music or art, photography or writing. Most people at some point in their life say they want to do something creative - they want to be an actor, a director, a writer, a poet, a painter or whatever.
Stewart Butterfield
#55. When you're shy, a camera becomes an entry into life. It was a kind of shield I could hide my shyness behind, and it allowed me to become an active observer rather than a passive one.
Lynn Johnston
#58. If youre not interested in life, then photography has no meaning
Ruth Bernhard
#59. One day I was speculating on how I would like to look back on life and I decided I wanted to feel that I was a photographer rather than a teacher. As simple as that.
David Hurn
#60. There is not a big difference between life and taking pictures ... You're in the middle of life, you're living, making love, eating, sleeping - and photography is part of it. And I don't say this because I'm being romantic. I say this because that's just the way it happens to be.
Anders Petersen
#61. Regarding the creative: never assume you're the master, only the student. Your audience will determine if you're masterful.
Don Roff
#62. Photography starts with the projection of the photographer, his understanding of life and himself into the picture.
Lisette Model
#63. Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.
John Berger
#65. Art is the highest task and the proper metaphysical activity of this life.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#67. My way of photographing is my way of life. I photograph from my experience, my way of seeing things ...
Sebastiao Salgado
#69. The photograph is completely abstracted from life, yet it looks like life. That is what has always excited me about photography.
Richard Kalvar
#72. [Robert Rauschenberg, 1925-2008] helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art - not to mention between art and life.
Michael Kimmelman
#73. In the act of love, as in photography, there is a form of life and a kind of slow death,
Nobuyoshi Araki
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. Photography was the only thing that mattered in my life and I gave it everything.
Anton Corbijn
#78. Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.
Photographs are.
Susan Sontag
#79. The purpose of photography is the transmission of a visualized sector of life through the medium of the camera into a mental process that starts with the photographer's thinking about the subject he photographs and is continued in the mind of the spectator.
Roman Vishniac
#80. Photography of any living being, according to Taliban rule, was illegal. So when I went to Afghanistan, immediately I was worried about photographing people. But it was what I wanted: to show what life was like under the Taliban, specifically for women.
Lynsey Addario
#81. I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time ... Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism-real life-the now.
Berenice Abbott
#82. A kind of golden hour one remembers for a life time ... Everything was touched with magic.
Margaret Bourke-White
#83. I've always wanted to be aware of what's going on around me, and I've wanted to use photography as an instrument of research into and reporting on the life of my own time.
Paul Strand
#84. A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you.
Brigitte Bardot
#85. As in any person's life, there have been difficult moments: I have a son with Down's syndrome; through my photography, I have witnessed all manner of human degradation. But there have also been very happy moments.
Sebastiao Salgado
#86. I've spent most of my life embracing violence in wars and revolutions. Even a famine is a form of violence. Because I photograph people in peril, people in pain, people being executed in front of me, I find it very difficult to get my head around the art narrative of photography.
Don McCullin
#87. Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.
Marc Riboud
#88. There's a time when people say your work is revolutionary, but you have to keep being revolutionary. I can't keep shooting pop stars all my life. You have to keep changing, keep pushing yourself, looking for the new, the unusual.
Rankin
#89. While I was there I became deeply interested in photography, and indeed the most noteworthy event in my early life was winning first, third, fourth and seventh prizes in an international competition for college and high school students.
Douglass North
#90. [The most important factor in making a good picture is] to know who or what you are photographing. It is not about photography; it should be about life.
Mona Kuhn
#91. A camera is just like a woman, as long as you have one of them hanging around your neck ... life is just fine
Sunny-Drunk
#92. Sometimes, without effort, you live in the moment. You don't regret the past or worry about the future, and in that moment everything flashes before your eyes , a clear snapshot of what has to be done, and everything pauses.
Rebecca McNutt
#93. I was drawn to street photography because there are pictures everywhere there: a woman holding a dog, a baby screaming to be put in a pram, kids playing punch ball, stores with huge barrels of kosher pickles outside. I wanted to photograph life, and here it was.
Harold Feinstein
#94. A picture was a motionless record of motion. An arrested representation of life. A picture was the kiss of death pretending to possess immutability.
Ivan Klima
#95. There are two kinds of photographers: those who compose pictures and those who take them. The former work in studios. For the latter, the studio is the world ... For them, the ordinary doesn't exist: every thing in life is a source of nourishment.
Ernst Haas
#96. Photography is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It's a way of life.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#97. Photography is an adventure just as life is an adventure. If man wishes to express himself photographically, he must understand, surely to a certain extent, his relationship to life.
Harry Callahan
#98. First rule to be a photographer, you have to be invisible.
Sameh Talhamy
#99. Working from photos makes you a little more analytical, a little more cerebral, because you're less connected to the intensity of life.
George L. Carlson
#100. Lifes light. Life is light. You can make light do anything you want to. Photography means 'light writing'.
L. Ron Hubbard
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