Top 100 Quotes About Photography
#1. My photography is the result of being there at the right moment.
Rene Burri
#2. Objectivity is of the very essence of photography, its contribution and at the same time its limitation
Paul Strand
#3. Simulations directly relate to the process of and complications in photography. They also overtly create layers of fantasies, myths and interventions ... The simulation confuses the idea of a truth. I've always been interested in this kind of theater and illusion at the foundation of belief.
Taryn Simon
#4. Essentially what photography is is life lit up.
Sam Abell
#5. I have a master's degree in photography as a fine art, and I would call my work primarily conceptual. I don't carry cameras with me wherever I go. I get an idea of a subject matter I want to deal with and I pull out my cameras.
Leonard Nimoy
#6. I think that any photographer is an investigator. Photography is a pretext to know the world, to know life. To know yourself.
Graciela Iturbide
#7. The creative process can sustain itself throughout the entire celebration of photography.
Jerry Uelsmann
#8. There was a time when one looked over one's shoulder with an ironical smile at the photographer and when photography as a profession seemed almost invariably a target for ridicule. That time is now over.
Albert Renger-Patzsch
#9. I try to consider each body of work on its own terms, discretely, so terms like 'sculpture' or 'photography', in their broad sense, don't really enter into my thinking.
Walead Beshty
#10. When I was teaching at Harvard in the 1970s, I went to Project Incorporated in Cambridge and took photography classes. I didn't even know how to aim the camera in those days.
Ann Beattie
#11. Over the years, photography has been to me what a journal is to a writer - a record of things seen and experienced, moments in the flow of time, documents of significance to me, experiments in seeing.
Beaumont Newhall
#12. The relation of photography and language is a principal site of struggle for value and power in contemporary representations of reality; it is the place where images and words find and lose their conscience, their aesthetic and ethical identity.
William J. Mitchell
#13. A photograph isn't necessarily a lie, but nor is it the truth. It's more of a fleeting, subjective impression. What I most like about photography is the moment that you can't anticipate: you have to be constantly watching for it, ready to welcome the unexpected.
Martine Franck
#14. The way that light hits objects, I think, is one of the more important things that sculpture and photography share.
Rashid Johnson
#15. Photography is the recording of strangeness and beauty with beguiling precision.
Sebastian Smee
#16. No photographer should be blamed when, instead of capturing reality, he tries to show things he has seen only in his imagination. Photography is the youngest art form. All attempts to enlarge its frontiers are important and should be encouraged.
Philippe Halsman
#17. A career in photography is a journey without a destination.
Joe McNally
#18. I've enjoyed photography, ever since I was a teenager, and I'm still at it. I've had shows in various cities, around the country, and I have a number of pieces in permanent collections in museums that I'm very proud of.
Leonard Nimoy
#19. My biggest challenge was moving from photography to film without losing my way of working - which is very intimate and learning to collaborate with more people, since photography for me is a very solitary process.
Maya Goded
#20. 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
#21. You are not a photographer because you are interested in photography.
David Hurn
#22. As a matter of fact, nearly all the greatest work is being, and has always been done, by those who are following photography for the love of it, and not merely for financial reasons. As the name implies, an amateur is one who works for love.
Alfred Stieglitz
#23. All painters are interested in photography to a certain extent.
David Hockney
#24. 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
#25. When I got to NYU, I immediately inquired about doing a double major in acting and photography.
Katherine Waterston
#26. Photography is a very subtle thing. You must let the camera take you by the hand, as it were, and lead you into your subject.
Margaret Bourke-White
#27. I don't like explosions. I don't mind progress. But digital photography has made every man, woman, child and chimpanzee a photographer of sorts and consequently has numbed down the general quality of photographs.
Elliott Erwitt
#28. If you can imagine photography in the guise of a woman and you'd ask her what she thought of Stieglitz, she'd say: He always treated me like a gentleman.
Alfred Stieglitz
#29. To teach consequential photography, don't bother with Photoshop or f-stops. Create a craving for images.
Douglas McCulloh
#30. Edward [Weston] was the first artist - and I don't use the word lightly - to make a living doing art photography. Other photographers did commercial work, or worked for the government.
Rondal Partridge
#31. A number of years ago, I found a book of photography by Weegee; he was a crime photographer in the 1930s in New York. He was the first person to put a police scanner in a car and drive around.
Dan Gilroy
#32. I hate to say I'm a photographer, because I learned photography as I went along. But I also hate to say I'm a painter, a draftsman, even an artist. I think it's good when you're confused about what you are; it means you haven't defined yourself as an artist yet.
Vik Muniz
#33. Photography has shaped the way I look at the world; it has taught me to look beyond myself and capture the world outside.
Lynsey Addario
#35. 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
#36. If the artist only reproduces superficial features as photography does, if he copies the lineaments of a face exactly, without reference to character, he deserves no admiration. The resemblance which he ought to obtain is that of the soul.
Auguste Rodin
#37. The gear you can't afford is not the barrier keeping you from success. Gear has very little to do with photography.
Chase Jarvis
#38. Loving photography and wanting to be a painter, it all ended up in the process of filmmaking. It's strange professionally be to connected because it connects you to architecture, it connects you to painting, it connects you to writers, to actors. It connects you to really all of the arts.
Wim Wenders
#39. Photography is about finding things. And painting is different - it's about making something.
Saul Leiter
#40. I love to play the guitar. I also love photography and fashion.
Emily Osment
#41. Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images.
Italo Calvino
#42. 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
#43. I was obsessed from the moment I took my first photograph. I wanted to make photography my career.
Giles Duley
#44. I got a lot of flak originally for writing with photographs, because the great cliche in photography is that one photograph is worth a thousand words, and photographers are usually dodo birds anyway.
Duane Michals
#45. The portrait is the subject matter in photography where the problems of the media are the most visible.
Thomas Struth
#47. Men have dominated the field of landscape photography just as they have dominated the land itself. Thus shooting a virgin landscape has been man's work - hunting, not gardening.
Lucy R. Lippard
#48. People criticized me for my photography. They said it's not art.
David Hockney
#49. A Ming vase can be well-designed and well-made and is beautiful for that reason alone. I don't think this can be true for photography. Unless there is something a little incomplete and a little strange, it will simply look like a copy of something pretty. We won't take an interest in it.
John Loengard
#50. I took a workshop from him a few months after that. That experience changed my whole approach to photography. At that workshop in Yosemite in 1973 I decided I wanted to try and see if I could pursue this for myself, and I'm still trying.
John Sexton
#51. Modern photography must do more than entertain, it must incite thought and by its clear statements of actuality, cultivate a sympathetic understanding of men and women and the life they live and create.
Max Dupain
#52. 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
#53. Inside movement there is one moment in which the elements are in balance. Photography must seize the importance of this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#54. I think photography has made us see the landscape in a very dull way - that's one of its effects. It's not spatial.
David Hockney
#55. The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge - the line that separates in from out - and on the shapes that are created by it.
John Szarkowski
#56. I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, 'the ability to conceive failure as progress.'
Jerry Saltz
#58. Photography intervenes in a very strange way. It makes the streets, gates, squares of the city into illustrations of a trashy novel, draws off the banal obviousness of this ancient architecture to inject it with the most pristine intensity ...
Louis Aragon
#59. Big game photography in Africa is mainly done from a vehicle, so then I feel I might as well take the lot.
Nigel Dennis
#60. Some people's photography is an art. Not mine. Art is a dirty word in photography. All this fine art crap is killing it already.
Helmut Newton
#61. Photography has every right and every merit to claim our attention as the art of our age.
Alexander Rodchenko
#62. On digital photography: It's fantastic, but it's not a freebie for anything. You still have to have this (he points to his eyes), and this (points to his heart), and feet.
Rene Burri
#64. For me, the importance of photography is that you can point to something, that you can let other people see things. Ultimately, it is a matter of the specialness of the ordinary.
Rineke Dijkstra
#65. In my teens I was interested in photography. Then I decided that I should learn something about the world of commerce. And I came to America at age 17 to escape Europe. I went to NYU - nothing better than being 17 years old and coming to New York.
Nicolas Berggruen
#66. I was always painting when I was a kid. But then when I handled a camera when I was 17, that was it for me. I loved photography. I would work 4 or 5 hours a day. It was like a calling.
David LaChapelle
#67. The clue to book jacket photography is to look friendly and approachable, but not too glamorous.
Antonia Fraser
#68. The movie stars and matinee idols are put into the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They can be bought and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes.
Marshall McLuhan
#69. Photography is a universal language, transcending the boundaries of race, politics, and nationality.
Arthur Rothstein
#70. Visual ideas combined with technology combined with personal interpretation equals photography. Each must hold it's own; if it doesn't, the thing collapses.
Arnold Newman
#71. Look at lots of exhibitions and books, and don't get hung up on cameras and technical things. Photography is about images.
Fay Godwin
#72. There is no question that photography has played a major role in the environmental movement.
Galen Rowell
#73. Photography is the most transparent of the art mediums devised or discovered by man. It is probably for this reason that it proves so difficult to make the photograph transcend its almost inevitable function as document and act as a work of art as well.
Clement Greenberg
#74. As the oldest I was a daddy's girl and loved him with all my heart. My daddy had holes in his shoes so that he could pay for my photography classes, you know what I mean.
Sherri Shepherd
#75. It's about time we started to take photography seriously and treat it as a hobby.
Elliott Erwitt
#76. I became involved in photography when I was about thirteen years old.
Leonard Nimoy
#77. The thing that interests me about photography, and why it's different from all other media, is that it's the only medium in which there is even the possibility of an accidental masterpiece.
Chuck Close
#78. The digital image annihilates photography while solidifying, glorifying and immortalizing the photographic.
Lev Manovich
#79. Fossils work almost the same way as photography as a record of history. The accumulation of time and history becomes a negative of the image. And this negative comes off, and the fossil is the positive side. This is the same as the action of photography.
Hiroshi Sugimoto
#80. I discovered that this camera was the technical means in photography of communicating what the world looks like in a state of heightened awareness. And it's that awareness of really looking at the everyday world with clear and focused attention that I'm interested in.
Stephen Shore
#81. 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
#82. I'm a huge, huge fan of photography. I have a small photography collection. As soon as I started to make some money, I bought my very first photograph: an Henri Cartier-Bresson. Then I bought a Robert Frank.
Annie Leibovitz
#83. A lot of people want to make films and do photography and things, but I'm quite happy doing what I'm doing.
Syd Barrett
#84. The problem for me is that I've never actually studied photography, so it's quite a steep learning curve. Cameras these days do so much for you automatically but I still think there's a point where you should actually know the technical side.
Graeme Le Saux
#85. Every viewer is going to get a different thing. That's the thing about painting, photography, cinema.
David Lynch
#86. Color tends to corrupt photography and absolute color corrupts it absolutely. Consider the way color film usually renders blue sky, green foliage, lipstick red, and the kiddies' playsuit. These are four simple words which must be whispered: color photography is vulgar.
Walker Evans
#88. Before movies, memory unspooled differently in the mind, trailing off in dust-blasted fade-out rather than spliced-together flashback; before photography, memory rippled like a reflection on water's surface, less precise but more profoundly true.
Steve Erickson
#89. My paintings have an ongoing dialogue with photography. There are many painters who would say the same, I'm sure. The difference is that I'm thinking more about the temporal aspect of photography, rather than the visual.
James Nares
#91. I give my grandfather, Dr Harold Young, a forestry Professor at the University of Maine, full credit for my career path. He pioneered the use of aerial photography in forestry in the 1950s, and we think he worked as a spy for the CIA during the Cold War, mapping Russian installations.
Sarah Parcak
#92. George Lucas wanted this moving camera for all of the photography in Star Wars. He was willing to take a risk with the concepts that I advanced with regard to ways for doing that.
John Dykstra
#93. I became enamored with photography when I was about 13 or 14 years old. I've been at it ever since. I studied seriously in the '70s.
Leonard Nimoy
#94. 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
#95. I come from a visual background. I used to work in the camera department at Warner Bros. when I was a teenager. I grew up dusting lenses and learning about photography.
Colin Hanks
#96. Photography is the art of not pushing the button.
Frank Horvat
#97. If you take 2001: A Space Odyssey as an example of somebody who creates a new language in film by what he was able to accomplish with art direction, photography, lighting, etc., it is still a gold standard for science fiction.
Matthew Modine
#98. We have a long history of snapshot photography that appeared to many to be more arbitrary and idiosyncratic than much of the work of professionals. We valued it for what it could tell us about the details of people's daily lives.
Fred Ritchin
#99. Of course I will continue photography. I love photography. But when you become old, it's too much.
Sebastiao Salgado
#100. I've been the head of the photography program at Bard College for over 30 years, and I take that as seriously as I do my photography. My time is devoted to that too.
Stephen Shore
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