Top 100 Quotes About The Photographer
#1. Ultimately success or failure in photographing people depends on the photographer's ability to understand his fellow man.
Edward Weston
#2. The inner chambers of the soul are like the photographer's darkroom. Like a laboratory. One cannot stay there all the time or it becomes the solitary cell of the neurotic.
Anais Nin
#3. I guess that's what I was: a set of abs. And they lit the abs and shot the abs and sent the abs on their way. The photographer didn't look at my face once. I was humiliated.
Michael Bergin
#4. New images surround us everywhere. They are invisible only because of sterile routine convention and fear. To find these images is to dare to see, to be aware of what there is and how it is. The photographer not only gets information, he gives information about life.
Lisette Model
#5. For me, the world is a stage, and we are all playing the character we have chosen to play on that stage. It is the job of the photographer to capture the drama of the performance.
Alix Smith
#6. The photograph isolates and perpetuates a moment of time: an important and revealing moment, or an unimportant and meaningless one, depending upon the photographer's understanding of his subject and mastery of his process.
Edward Weston
#7. Take your camera off automatic. You are the photographer.
Steve Coleman
#8. In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
Susan Sontag
#9. There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.
Ansel Adams
#10. The photographer begins to feel big and bloated and so big he can't walk through one of these doors because he gets a good byline; he gets notices all over the world and so forth; but they're really - the important people are the people he photographs.
Gordon Parks
#11. Let us not be afraid to allow for post-visualization. By post-visualization I refer to the willingness on the part of the photographer to revisualize the final image at any point in the entire photographic process.
Jerry Uelsmann
#12. To quote out of context is the essence of the photographer's craft.
John Szarkowski
#13. Essentially what you're doing is collaborating with the photographer to create an image that reflects the fashion you're trying to capture and also hold a mirror up to the zeitgeist at the moment.
Hamish Bowles
#14. "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
#15. Experience has shown that the more fascinating the subject, the less observant the photographer.
Andreas Feininger
#16. I started modeling and after a while the photographer Bruce Weber introduced me to Joel Schumacher, who cast me in my first film, and I just fell in love.
Cody Horn
#18. The artist is always concerned with a total view of the world. However, when the photographer takes a picture ... the edge of his picture is just as interesting as the middle, one can only guess at the existence of a whole, and the view presented seems chosen by chance.
Eugene Delacroix
#19. It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.
Dorothea Lange
#20. The photographer must be absorbent - like a blotter, allow himself to be permeated by the poetic moment ... His technique should be like an animal function ... he should act automatically.
Robert Doisneau
#21. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.
Eve Arnold
#22. The photographer had caught her midlaugh, and the defiance of her bared teeth and wide lips gave her face a hint of mischief and forthrightness. The girl in this photograph bet the house.
Libba Bray
#23. The photographer hopes, in brief, to discover a tension so exact that it is peace.
Robert Adams
#24. 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
#25. The photographer's intentions do not determine the meaning of a photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it.
Susan Sontag
#26. Sometimes they are a matter of luck; the photographer could not expect or hope for them. Sometimes they are a matter of patience, waiting for an effect to be repeated that he has seen and lost or for one that he anticipates.
Bill Brandt
#27. Andre Breton once said that a portrait should not only be an image but an oracle one questions, and that the photographer's aim should be a profound likeness, which physically and morally predicts the subject's entire future.
Bill Brandt
#28. A camera exposes more than just an image. It also exposes the photographer.
Steve Coleman
#29. The artist and the photographer seek the mysteries and the adventure of experience in nature.
Ansel Adams
#30. My argument against the set-up picture is that it leaves the matter of content to the imagination of the photographer, a faculty that, in my experience, is generally deficient compared to the mad swirling possibilities that our dear common world kicks up at us on a regular basis.
Tod Papageorge
#31. I think what makes a picture is a moment that is completely spontaneous and natural and unaffected by the photographer.
Bill Eppridge
#32. I've only done one shoot where it's modeling clothes, not like me in my environment. And the stylist, literally, I had her stand behind the photographer and do poses.
Elizabeth Olsen
#33. Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper the photographer begins with the finished product.
Edward Steichen
#34. To the complaint, 'There are no people in these photographs,' I respond, There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.
Ansel Adams
#35. It is part of the photographer's job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep in him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time or of the traveler who enters a strange country.
Bill Brandt
#36. The goal for the photographer is be visually articulate.
Dennis Stock
#37. For a feature in next month's issue of Prog magazine, the photographer spent many hours setting up a photo shoot of me with part of my music collection in my writing office. Since I do most of my writing outside in nature, we felt this shot was most representative.
Kevin J. Anderson
#38. I try to photograph people's spirits and thoughts. As to the soul-taking by the photographer, I don't feel I take away, but rather that the sitter and I give to each other. It becomes an act of mutual participation.
Yousuf Karsh
#39. Sprawled out on the photographer's mattress with my clothes lying in a heap somewhere in the kitchen, I pull the waistband of my briefs down to expose my hipbones, and I think of home.
Kris Kidd
#40. [The photographer's task] is to describe the existing light ... Chances are, if you believe the light, you're going to believe that the things photographed existed in the world.
Henry Wessel Jr.
#41. The present challenge to the photographer is to express inner significance through outward form.
Beaumont Newhall
#42. In the end, the photographer shot a close-up of Troy holding a photo of himself waiting in a much more interesting line fifteen years ago.
It was a humiliating setback for them as individuals and for the line as a whole.
Rainbow Rowell
#43. off, but Osgood, the photographer, was already snoring softly. He was in the center seat, wedged between John Thigpen and
Sara Gruen
#44. In my stolen photographs
for the photographer must be a thief, he must steal instants of other people's time to make his own tiny eternities
it was this intimacy I sought, hte closeness of the living and the dead.
Salman Rushdie
#45. It's not the photographer who makes the picture, but the person being photographed.
Sebastiao Salgado
#46. The camera cannot, but the photographer can.
Ansel Adams
#47. A journalist is supposed to present an unbiased portrait of an event, a view devoid of intimate emotions. This is impossible, of course. The framing of an image, by its very composition, represents a choice. The photographer chooses what to show and what to exclude.
Alexandra Kerry
#48. I know the importance of highly trained awareness of the "moment" and the immediate and intuitive response of the photographer. It should be obvious to all that photographers whose images possess character and quality have attained them only by continued practice and total dedication to the medium.
Ansel Adams
#49. I think that the photos that we like were made when the photographer knew how to disappear. If there were a secret, certainly that would be it.
Edouard Boubat
#50. His eyes were polite yet maleficent, as though he was making an effort to be civil to the photographer while plotting to murder his wife.
Arundhati Roy
#51. I think that a visual artist's philosophy develops much more freely than a writer's or a thinker's philosophy. It is not so disciplined. The photographer works with both his eyes and his mind.
Manuel Alvarez Bravo
#52. The shutter of the photographer's camera makes that repeated mechanical sound. That unlocking and locking of the doors of light to send momentary images of the present into the light trap of the past.
Simon Mawer
#53. I have always thought that the photographer does artistic work and that art consists of working with fictional premises.
Joan Fontcuberta
#54. The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.
Susan Sontag
#55. The photographer, even in fashion and portraiture, has to have a standpoint. It's important to know what you stand for, no? Most people just take pictures, but they stand for nothing. They follow trends and don't know why.
Peter Lindbergh
#56. The photographer must bear the responsibility for his work and its effect ... [for] photographic journalism, because of its tremendous audience reached by publications using it, has more influence on public thinking than any other branch of photography.
W. Eugene Smith
#57. Being a digital photographer I'm in awe of the older generation of photographers who created all those iconic cinematic style images on film, such as Man Ray's portrait of the photographer Lee Miller.
Paul Walker
#58. We are often taught to look for the beauty in all things, so in finding it, the layman asks the philosopher while the philosopher asks the photographer.
Criss Jami
#59. The camera only facilitates the taking. The photographer must do the giving in order to transform and transcend ordinary reality. The problem is to transform without deforming. He must gain intensity in form and content by bringing a subjective order into an objective chaos.
Ernst Haas
#60. A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
John Berger
#61. The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
Susan Sontag
#63. [the photographer] can be considered a kind of disembodied burrowing eye, a conspirator against time and its hammers. His work, print after print of it, seems to call to be shown before the decay which it portrays flattens all ... Here are the records of the age before an imminent collapse.
Jack Kerouac
#64. The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.
Brooks Atkinson
#65. The photographer who attempts to fit happily into the world by using the traditional perspective of the camera will end up falling into the hole of the "idea" he has dug for himself.
Daido Moriyama
#66. I believe it is the photographer's function to reveal that which is concealed, even if it be repugnant to the majority, not merely to record what we see around us.
Arthur Tress
#67. The photographer's art is a continuous discovery which requires patience and time.
Andre Kertesz
#68. The photographer must possess and preserve the receptive faculties of a child who looks at the world for the first time.
Bill Brandt
#69. Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment.
Ansel Adams
#70. The subject matter is so much more important than the photographer.
Gordon Parks
#71. Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.
Walker Evans
#72. There are photographic fanatics, just as there are religious fanatics. They buy a so-called candid camera there is no such thing: it's the photographer who has to be candid, not the camera.
Weegee
#73. The photographer projects himself into everything he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to know it and to feel it better.
Minor White
#74. The photographer is filled with doubt. Nothing will soothe him.
Raymond Depardon
#75. Light is the photographic medium par excellence; it is to the photographer what words are to the writer; color and paint to the painter; wood, metal, stone, or clay to the sculptor.
Andreas Feininger
#76. Sometimes I think I prefer the storyteller in [Roman Vishniac] to the photographer. But aren't they one and the same?
Elie Wiesel
#77. One eye of the photographer looks wide open through the viewfinder, the other, the closed looks into his own soul.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#78. The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.
Susan Sontag
#79. Whether you are Minor White or Robert Frank, almost every photograph starts with an act of pure description - a window. But every now and then you catch a glimpse of the photographer's reflection. The mirror is just another function of the window.
Alec Soth
#80. The photographer proceeds, via the intermediary of the lens, to a point where he literally takes a luminous imprint, a cast ... [But] the cinema realizes the paradox of moulding itself on the time of the object and of taking the imprint of its duration as well.
Andre Bazin
#81. These are the two basic controls at the photographer's command
positi on and timing
all others are extensions, peripheral ones, compared to them
David Hurn
#82. The subject isn't always a help to the photographer, it's like handcuffs.
Raymond Depardon
#83. The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes the past.
Berenice Abbott
#84. What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.
Walter Benjamin
#85. I will be remembered when I'm in heaven. People won't remember my name, but they will know the photographer who did that picture of that nurse being kissed by the sailor at the end of World War II. Everybody remembers that.
Alfred Eisenstaedt
#86. No matter how slow the film, Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer it has chosen.
Minor White
#87. I think the photographer is in love with the deaf woman, Genevieve says finally. Mercedes fingers the lip of her mug. How can you tell? He touches her the way we touch the books.
Lindsey Drager
#88. There's a kind of telepathy that goes on with the photographer and model.
Jerry Hall
#89. I like it when one is not certain what one sees. When we do not know why the photographer has taken a picture and when we do not know why we are looking at it, all of a sudden we discover something that we start seeing. I like this confusion.
Saul Leiter
#90. The awareness of the quality of space in out photos is akin to our awareness of the very air in our photos, the atmosphere that pervades every square inch of our image and yet is often invisible to the photographer.
Jay Maisel
#91. No surfer wants to be the photographer, especially when the waves are good.
Nick Woodman
#92. The precise instant of creation is when you choose the subject. (meaning that the essential thing occurs at the moment when he, the photographer, meets the reality he wishes to capture.
Brassai
#93. When I first started to take photographs in Czechoslovakia, I met this old gentleman, this old photographer, who told me a few practical things. One of the things he said was, "Josef, a photographer works on the subject, but the subject works on the photographer."
Josef Koudelka
#94. Emphasis on technique is justified only so far as it will simplify and clarify the statement of the photographer's concept.
Ansel Adams
#95. Is giving in to the photographer's presumably natural impulse to compose and light well sometimes okay and not okay other times?
David Byrne
#96. Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.
Susan Sontag
#97. Aesthetics does not exist for the camera as an isolated entity. Aesthetics, in fact, is inseparable from the purpose of the photographer and the use he makes of his theme. When photography fails ... it is usually because a false separation has been imposed on form and content.
Sid Grossman
#98. In terms of image-repertoire, the Photographer (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death.
Roland Barthes
#99. A photograph is usually the photographer's subconscious attempted to possess the photographed moment.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#100. I am not used to doing naked shoots but when you trust the photographer and the crew, you know it won't be vulgar.
Gisele Bundchen
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