Quotes About Nature Photography

#1. 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

#2. Nature photography ... that acknowledges what is wrong, is admittedly sometimes hard to bear - it has to encompass our mistakes. Yet in the long run, it is important; in order to endure our age of apocalypse, we have to be reconciled not only to avalanche and hurricane, but to ourselves.

Robert Adams

#3. If art is the poetic interpretation of nature, photography is the exact translation; it is exactitude in art or the complement of art. (1854)

Charles Negre

#4. The commonest forms of amateur natural history in the United States are probably gardening, bird watching, the maintenance of aquarium fish, and nature photography.

Marston Bates

#5. Their intensive 1 -day nature photography instructional seminars. Both love to teach others how to make their own fine photographs.

Anonymous

#6. All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence. Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty.

Andre Bazin

#7. Nature is beautiful in all its chaos. However, a nature photograph is beautiful only in the absence of chaos.

Mike MacDonald

#8. One sees differently with color photography than black-and-white ... in short, visualization must be modified by the specific nature of the equipment and materials being used.

Ansel Adams

#9. Photography is a bridge between science and art. It brings to science what it needs most, the artistic sense, and to art the proof that nothing can be imagined which cannot be matched in the counterpoints of nature.

Ernst Haas

#10. The whole nature of photography has changed with the advent of a camera in everybody's hand.

Sally Mann

#11. My emotions, instincts, and interests are all with nature.

Eliot Porter

#12. Film photography will always be superior to digital - because no matter how many lasers and instant buttons and HD pixels you've got, a human being can take a photograph with much more integrity and meaning than one a built-in robot took.

Rebecca McNutt

#13. Many cherish the idea that a photograph is an exact presentment of nature, and accept without question the paradox that a photograph cannot lie. Actually there never was a more unmitigated liar.

Walter J. Phillips

#14. Photography is a witness against the mistaken opinion that art is an imitation of nature.

Heinrich Heine

#15. Many photographers think they are photographing nature when they are only caricaturing her.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#16. Twentieth-century art has allowed me to see things in a cryptic way. I love the butterfly's wings, which disappear when folded and when open leave this brilliant, intense pronouncement of nature, 'Here I am.'

Emmet Gowin

#17. The only nature I'm interested in is my own nature.

Aaron Siskind

#18. When you look at nature, you see a hidden mystery that gives a special flavor to the photograph.

Abbas Kiarostami

#19. I'm not satirical in a traditional way. What I do is more about creating caricatures and cartoons. I am commentating on the nature of how we live through photography, and how you can twist an angle to create a different perception of a person.

Alison Jackson

#20. Photography is nature seen from the eyes outwards. Painting is nature seen from the eyes inwards.

Charles Sheeler

#21. If I didn't have a conviction that a serious painter can portray Nature more profoundly than the best colour photography, I'd probably give it all up or go abstract or take up photography.

E. J. Hughes

#22. When you take pictures of nature with passion, nature poses for you more passionately!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#23. A photograph of a woman crying tells me nothing about grief. Or a photograph of a woman ecstatic tells me nothing about ecstasy. What is the nature of these emotions? The problem with photography is that it only deals with appearances.

Duane Michals

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. I became interested in photography during my first visit to the United States. I was a student at a university in Holland. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the American West. That was when I learned about the tradition of nature in American photography.

Frans Lanting

#27. "Only with effort can the camera be forced to lie: basically it is an honest medium: so the photographer is much more likely to approach nature in a spirit of inquiry, of communion, instead of with the saucy swagger of self-dubbed "artists"."

Edward Weston

#28. Since the recording process is instantaneous, and the nature of the image such that it cannot survive corrective handwork, it is obvious that the finished print must be created in full before the film is exposed.

Edward Weston

#29. Photography started as a means of getting reference material for my paintings of nature subjects.

Nigel Dennis

#30. Practice the mechanics of making photographs until it becomes second nature.

Fred Picker

#31. Every photograph is a fiction with pretensions to truth. Despite everything that we have been inculcated, all that we believe, photography always lies; it lies instinctively, lies because its nature does not allow it to do anything else.

Joan Fontcuberta

#32. 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

#33. Nature photographs downright bore me for some reason or other. I think: 'Oh, yes. Look at that sand dune. What of it?'

Walker Evans

#34. It is because of the servility of photography that I am fundamentally contemptuous of this chance invention which will never be an art but which plagiarizes nature by means of optics. (1848)

Alphonse De Lamartine

#35. 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

#36. If you don't capture the moments, it will be gone forever.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#37. 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

#38. Timothy O'Sullivan was, it seems to me, the greatest of the photographers because he understood nature first as architecture.

Robert Adams

#39. It is just as important to bring people the evidence of the beauty of the world of nature and of man as it is to give them a document of ugliness, squalor, and despair.

Ansel Adams

#40. Photography, when used as a representational art, is not a mere copy of nature. This is proved by the rarity of the 'good' photograph.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

#41. Nature is a picture waiting to be taken.

Katja Michael

#42. Actually, it's nature itself that creates the most beautiful pictures, I'm only choosing the perspective.

Katja Michael

#43. 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

#44. If I could find them (assemblages) in nature I would photograph them. I make them because through photography I have a knowledge of things that can't be found.

Frederick Sommer

#45. Photography is a medium, a language, through which I might come to experience directly, live more closely with, the interaction between myself and nature.

Paul Caponigro

#46. Photography promises an enhanced mastery of nature, but photography also threatens conflagration and anarchy.

Allan Sekula

#47. In a world of disturbing images, the general body of photography is bland, dealing complacently with nature and treating our preconceptions as insights. Strange, private worlds rarely slip past our guard ...

Henry Holmes Smith

#48. Photography by nature is spiritual, considering it comes from the darkness to show the light.

Kevin Russo

#49. The photogram, or camera-less record of forms produced by light, which embodies the unique nature of the photographic process, is the real key to photography.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

#50. The point of my photography has always been to challenge myself, to go a little further than my Germanic discipline and Teutonic nature would traditionally permit me to.

Helmut Newton

#51. Every traveler should make their own observation.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#52. Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

#53. It is not in the nature of lenses to tell the whole truth. They are instruments of exaggeration and belittlement.

Walter J. Phillips

#54. PHOTOGRAPHY is the best way, where you can SAVE your sweet PAST.

Aman Verma

#55. Compelling outdoor imagery always combines some kind of personal connection to nature and skillful technique. The former seems to be a form of grace, and the latter an act of the will.

George B. Ward