Top 100 Quotes About Photography
#1. Photography allows you to learn to look and see. You begin to see things you'd never paid attention to.
Saul Leiter
#2. 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
#3. The key is to integrate our art into our life, not the other way around.
Brooks Jensen
#4. 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
#5. 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
#7. Speed, the fundamental condition of the activities of our day is the power of photography, indeed the modern art of today, the art of the split second.
Lisette Model
#8. 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
#9. I'm not a religious person. The language of photography is symbolic.
Sebastiao Salgado
#10. 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
#11. Leica, schmeica. The camera doesn't make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But you have to see.
Ernst Haas
#12. Being a celebrity you always get really good seats to sporting events but you never get as good seats as the photographers get. And I really love sports. So one of the scams I have going now is I want to learn sports photography so I can get better seats at a sporting event.
Drew Carey
#13. Ultimately success or failure in photographing people depends on the photographer's ability to understand his fellow man.
Edward Weston
#14. Photograph because you love doing it, because you absolutely have to do it, because the chief reward is going to be the process of doing it. Other rewards - recognition, financial remuneration - come to so few and are so fleeting ... Take photography on as a passion, not a career.
Alex Webb
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. I was offered $100,000 for a print. Then I woke up.
Bill Jay
#19. My focus is anything that allows me to express myself. Rap, dance, photography. Those are my forms of expression.
Keith Stanfield
#20. Photography is 1% talent and 99% moving furniture.
Arnold Newman
#21. 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
#23. 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
#25. 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
#26. Photographers feel guilty that all they do for a living is press a button.
Andy Warhol
#27. It seems so utterly naive that landscape - not that of the pictorial school - is not considered of "social significance" when it has a far more important bearing on the human race of a given locale than excrescences called cities.
Edward Weston
#28. The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.
Susan Sontag
#29. Photography is like a river with a thousand streams that never converge.
Massimo Vitali
#30. I'm so drawn to photography because you can convey a complex story in a single frame.
Gia Coppola
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. I like to think that the music is a mixture of personal experiences mixed with photography and movies.
Sune Rose Wagner
#36. 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.
#37. I've been into photography for years and I do it as often as possible. I'm just trying to develop myself.
C. J. Wilson
#38. There comes a moment when it is no longer you who takes the photograph, but receives the way to do it quite naturally and fully.
Sebastiao Salgado
#39. I began to see cinema as the perfect combination of so many wonderful art forms - painting, photography, music, dance, theater.
James Gray
#40. Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.
Berenice Abbott
#41. Best wide-angle lens? Two steps backward. Look for the 'ah-ha'.
Ernst Haas
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. At exhibition openings always praise the chicken for laying eggs; you can wring its neck later.
Bill Jay
#45. 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
#46. Every day I am aware of the flow and constant change; perhaps I am at the edge of discovering what more our bodies might be able to teach about the spirit of life. At least, I am always exploring and trying to understand our relationship to the whole universe.
Ruth Bernhard
#47. 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
#48. The photographer is a manipulator of light; photography is a manipulation of light.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
#49. The thing that was most interesting to me was getting my first prints back from the printer and realizing photography doesn't end with the click of a button, it starts there. Printing is so exciting.
Bryan Adams
#50. 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
#51. The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.
Susan Sontag
#52. 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
#53. I never took it upon myself to change the world. And those contemporaries of mine who were going around falling for the idea that they were going to bring down the United States government and make a new world were just asses to me.
Walker Evans
#54. Probably one of the worst things that happened to photography is that cameras have viewfinders.
John Baldessari
#55. With light field technology, there is a huge opportunity for creativity in photography that hasn't been available in the past.
Ren Ng
#56. Photography isolates the world via an aperture and gives the photographer the means to see differently, to achieve a spontaneous vision that is direct and uncompromising.
Ellsworth Kelly
#57. In the act of love, as in photography, there is a form of life and a kind of slow death,
Nobuyoshi Araki
#59. My father was a psycho-analyst and I think that fact was very influential on my development as an artist. Trying to search beneath the surface of things for an unexpected sense of mystery.
Gregory Crewdson
#60. A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.
Mark Twain
#61. If it makes you laugh, if it makes you cry, if it rips out your heart, that's a good picture.
Eddie Adams
#62. If acting doesn't work out, I plan to do food photography and just eat my way through the entire world. I'm a big foodie, and if I could make some career out of it, that would be fantastic.
Jamie Chung
#63. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
Susan Sontag
#64. Their intensive 1 -day nature photography instructional seminars. Both love to teach others how to make their own fine photographs.
Anonymous
#65. [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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. The thing that's fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.
Imogen Cunningham
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. I took courses at USC in film editing and art direction and photography when I was still in high school.
Ray Harryhausen
#73. What inspires me still: travel, art, photography, my kids, the places I haven't been to yet.
Jillian Barberie
#74. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. It's more important for a photographer to have very good shoes, than to have a very good camera
Sebastiao Salgado
#79. I've seen so many photographers rush to do books the minute they start shooting, but one great thing about photography is that the images don't go away, so the more I sit with these images, the more I learn which ones have had the most impact.
Lynsey Addario
#80. In photography, you always have both the medium and the depicted subject at the same time.
Thomas Ruff
#81. 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
#82. Isn't it amazing how photography has advanced without improving.
Charles Sheeler
#84. 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
#85. Perhaps most intriguing of all is that it is possible to photograph what is impossible for the human eye to see - cumulative time.
Michael Kenna
#86. Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
Susan Sontag
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. The camera points both ways. In expressing the subject you also express yourself ...
Freeman Patterson
#90. Sometimes one waits too long for the perfect moment before snapping the picture. You never realize that you needed was to change perspective.
Miguel Syjuco
#91. I am interested in computers and technology, and art, photography, and design.
William Landay
#92. This is the gift of the landscape photograph, that the heart finds a place to stand.
Emmet Gowin
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. Emailing a meaningful photograph to someone who is not expecting it can change a relationship forever.
Nick Kelsh
#96. 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
#97. This profession [photography] is deserving of attention and respect equal to that accorded painting, literature, music and architecture.
Ansel Adams
#98. 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
#100. The function of the photographer is to help people understand the world around them.
Sid Grossman
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