The Photograph Quotes

#1. In almost every photograph I have ever made, there is something I would do to complete it. I take that to be the spirit hole or the deliberate mistake that's in a Navajo rug to not be godlike, but to be human.

Sam Abell

#2. What is it that angers us? ... We have been tricked. In essence, we have been lied to. The problem is not that the photograph has been manipulated, but that we have been manipulated by the photograph.

Errol Morris

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. If there is pain in my photographs, it relates to the pain in my own existence.

Joel-Peter Witkin

#6. The subject gives you the best idea of how to make a photograph. So I just wait for something to happen.

Mary Ellen Mark

#7. When you find yourself beginning to feel a bond between yourself and the people you photograph, when you laugh and cry with their laughter and tears, you will know you are on the right track.

Weegee

#8. 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

#9. A photograph gives us the naked truth,which has to be clothed by the imagination.

Francis Meadow Sutcliffe

#10. There was no question about it- the girl in the photograph was staggeringly beautiful. She was Miss Canal Zone, a runner-up in the Miss Universe Contest
and in fact far more beautiful than the winner of the contests. Her beauty had frightened the judges.

Kurt Vonnegut

#11. I have always done the opposite of what I was trained to do ... Having little technical background, I became a photographer. Adopting a machine, I do my utmost to make it malfunction. For me, to make a photograph is to make an anti-photograph.

William Klein

#12. Now that's a sight for sore eyes, Sebastian. Maybe I should just leave you here: the hotel maids might appreciate that. Or, better still, maybe I'll take a photograph of you on my phone. Dont worry, I wont post it on the internet, it'll just be my screen saver.

Jane Harvey-Berrick

#13. We are judged, not by the photographs we take, but by the photographs we show.

Ted Grant

#14. A photograph is a moment - when you press the button, it will never come back.

Rene Burri

#15. I tried to keep both arts alive, but the camera won. I found that while the camera does not express the soul, perhaps a photograph can!

Ansel Adams

#16. In every form of art, you really want the experience of the images to transcend the medium, for the medium to disappear into the greater experience of viewing the work. So that you forget you are looking at a painting, or a photograph.

Bill Henson

#17. 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.

#18. 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

#19. If you reduce sculpture to the flat plane of the photograph, you're passing on only a residue of your concerns ... You're not only reducing the sculpture to a different scale for the purposes of consumption, but you're denying the real content of the work.

Richard Serra

#20. Now in the 1980s, I happened to notice that if you look at an aerial photograph of an African village, you see fractals. And I thought, 'This is fabulous! I wonder why?' And of course I had to go to Africa and ask folks why.

Ron Eglash

#21. Anything that excites me for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual.

Edward Weston

#22. I never know in advance what I will photograph, ... I Go Out into the World and Hope I Will come across something that Imperatively interests me. I Am Addicted to the Found object. I have No doubt that I Will Continue to make Photographs till my last Breath.

Ansel Adams

#23. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.

Richard Avedon

#24. I tend to always carry a camera with me. I live next to a fire station, and I've got lots of photos of the hook and ladder coming out of the house. And I like food, so I tend to photograph wonderfully presented food all the time. To me those are very pleasant memories.

Gordon Bell

#25. About shadows: do we see shadows? Loads of people don't. A camera will notice a shadow, but how many people have got a shadow in front of them when they take a picture and don't notice it, and then they see it in the photograph because the photograph will catch the shadow.

David Hockney

#26. Doesn't the world inside a black and white photograph seem more real? It's because the real world is losing its color

Tablo

#27. Anybody can direct a picture once they know the fundamentals. Directing is not a mystery, it's not an art. The main thing about directing is: photograph the people's eyes.

John Ford

#28. The real truth of life is on the streets. Photograph the daily lives of people, and how they exist, and how they fight for space and time and pleasure.

Don McCullin

#29. I don't know if all the women in the photographs are beautiful, but I do know that the women are beautiful in the photographs.

Garry Winogrand

#30. 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

#31. Sometimes we work so fast that we don't really understand what's going on in front of the camera. We just kind of sense that, 'Oh my God, it's significant!' and photograph impulsively while trying to get the exposure right. Exposure occupies my mind while intuition frames the images.

Minor White

#32. When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.

Roland Barthes

#33. Many claim I am a photographer of tragedy. In the greater sense I am not, for though I often photograph where the tragic emotion is present, the result is almost invariably affirmative.

W. Eugene Smith

#34. But sometimes it takes only a photograph and a sentence to make an author cry himself to sleep even years after the photograph was taken.

Lemony Snicket

#35. This is the gift of the landscape photograph, that the heart finds a place to stand.

Emmet Gowin

#36. 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

#37. The greatest photographs are motivated by human feeling.

David Burnett

#38. Artists with the lack of proper education and experience of working from life will copy whatever is visible on the photograph, without knowing what's underneath. As a result, instead of creating the in-depth and full of character portrait, they draw a mask with no soul.

Igor Babailov

#39. I have the instinctive reaction of a Western man when confronted with sublimely incomprehensible. I grab my camera and start to photograph it

Douglas Adams

#40. One day the photograph is going to become even more important than it is now ... But I am not particularly an advocate of the photograph.

Robert Smithson

#41. People say: But photographs are all lies. That's not the point. The lie is a truth, too. How the hell are we going to know what Kissinger looks like? Well, the photograph tells us one version; I'm trying to tell it also, but differently.

Leon Golub

#42. We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium.

Ansel Adams

#43. Your photograph is all I have: it is with me from the morning when I wake up with a frantic half dream about you to the last moment when I think of you and of death at night.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#44. When you look at pornography, the women become objects, whereas what I'm trying to do is make the person in the photograph as important as their body. And obviously, I like tits and arse, because I just do. I like the sex of taking photographs.

Rankin

#45. I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else. Excitement about the subject is the voltage which pushes me over the mountain of drudgery necessary to produce the final photograph.

Berenice Abbott

#46. You have to bring to the photograph a prejudice about something, and I'm prejudiced against farmers who tie dead animals on fences. Therefore, I can make a meaningful photograph.

Rondal Partridge

#47. As time passes by and you look at portraits, the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit. Photography has something to do with death. It's a trace.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

#48. It must be hard to be a model, because you'd want to be like the photograph of you, and you can't ever look that way.

Andy Warhol

#49. A photograph can, by the addition of an unimportant spot of color, become a photomontage, a work of art of a special kind.

John Heartfield

#50. At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.

Toni Morrison

#51. Dialectical thought is related to vulgar thinking in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion.

Leon Trotsky

#52. One thing I would never photograph is a dog lying in the mud.

Diane Arbus

#53. A photograph can show a physical image in which time is static, and a mirror can show a physical image in which time is dynamic, but I think that what he saw on the mountain was another kind of image altogether which was not physical and did not exist in time at all.

Robert M. Pirsig

#54. Authenticity is too big a subject to just toss in with the question about the photographs!

Rachel Kushner

#55. The suburban landscape is alien and strange and exotic. I photograph it out of longing and desire. My photographs are also about repression and internal angst.

Gregory Crewdson

#56. When it comes to partnership, some humans can make their lives alone - it's possible. But creatively, it's more like painting: you can't just use the same colours in every painting. It's just not an option. You can't take the same photograph every time and live with art forms with no differences.

Ben Harper

#57. The photograph is completely abstracted from life, yet it looks like life. That is what has always excited me about photography.

Richard Kalvar

#58. We feel more emotion ... before an amateur photograph linked to our own life history than before the work of a Great Photographer, because his domain partakes of art, and the intent of the souvenir-object remains at the lower level of personal history.

Chris Marker

#59. In the summer, it's short greens and tall greens and sometimes a smudge of other colors. In winter, it's squinty white,and sometimes deep when it looks flat. In early spring and late fall, the town gets brown and black, like an old photograph.

Blue Balliett

#60. I think you have to have a real point of view that's your own. You have to tell it your way. And, I think that it's a mistake to shoot for a specific magazine's point of view because it's never going to be as good. You have to shoot for yourself and photograph [ the way] you believe it..

Mary Ellen Mark

#61. I crave to be able to photograph the way a painter paints - in a loose, expressive way.

Chris Jordan

#62. The decision as to when to photograph, the actual click of the shutter, is partly controlled from the outside, by the flow of life, but it also comes from the mind and the heart of the artist. The photograph is his vision of the world and expresses, however subtly, his values and convictions.

Paul Strand

#63. Every photograph that is made whether by one who considers himself a professional, or by the tourist who points his snapshot camera and pushes a button, is a response to the exterior world, to something perceived outside himself by the person who operates the camera.

Eliot Porter

#64. Some presentation authors justify this by saying, "The photographer already knew it was going to be an uncredited effort and it really isn't that hard to take a good photograph.

Neal Ford

#65. A photograph offers us a glimpse into the abyss of time.

John Updike

#66. That's what makes it a good photograph. You think you know what's going on in her head. but the truth? No matter how good a photograph is, you can never tell what's going on in the person's mind. There's no way to get from here to there.

David Levithan

#67. As I progressed further with my project, it became obvious that it was really unimportant where I chose to photograph. The particular place simply provided an excuse to produce work ... you can only see what you are ready to see - what mirrors your mind at that particular time.

George A Tice

#68. He couldn't help but wonder if Moses Levy had experienced this same heat, if true images burned their maker. He wondered, too, if the hermit at that riverside was right, if there wasn't some element of capturing a soul in each photograph, if he wasn't responsible for those whose images he caught.

Alice Hoffman

#69. You think you photograph a particular scene for the pleasure it gives. In fact it's the scene that wants to be photographed. You're merely an extra in the production.

Jean Baudrillard

#70. For a photographer, it's a necessity that you can shoot stuff magically. Accidents are necessary, but after I take the photograph, it's not over. I work on it more.

Rinko Kawauchi

#71. The simple fact is this: There are no neutral photographs.

A. D. Coleman

#72. It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photograph that it isolates single moments in time.

Marshall McLuhan

#73. Obviously, we can see what was in front of the camera, but if a photograph is honestly made, it's a bit of a self-portrait. I think it's impossible for a photographer who is working honestly to keep this from happening.

John Sexton

#74. Perhaps, all these years, the historiographers had been unwilling to recognize history as a spiral, perhaps because a spiral was so difficult to describe. Easier to photograph the spiral from the top, easier to flatten the spring into a coil.

Anthony Burgess

#75. He could still see his parents beaming up at him from the tattered old photograph, unaware that their lives, like so many of those around them, were drawing to a close. The

J.K. Rowling

#76. The logic of the photograph is neither verbal nor syntactical, a condition which renders literary culture quite helpless to cope with the photograph.

Marshall McLuhan

#77. What is most appealing about young folks, after all, is the changes, not the still photograph of finished character but the movie, the soul in flux.

Thomas Pynchon

#78. There are no absolute truths, and the best historians know that. You strive to capture a moment of time, and if your work is done properly, history becomes a written photograph.

Gloria Naylor

#79. The field of action of a photograph should be that chessboard of the heart and mind upon which poetry and art have always operated

Frederick Sommer

#80. This stupid celebrity thing is just a consequence of being good at what you do. I mean, no one would photograph David Beckham if he wasn't the best attacking midfielder in the country - much as I hate Man. U!

Nick Moran

#81. A photograph is not an accident - is a concept. It exists at, or before, the moment of exposure of the negative.

Ansel Adams

#82. All my photographs seep through EMOTION , through the relationship I establish with the place I am portraying. Whenever I see something that captivates me, I start turning around it to find MY OWN frame. I work on myself and on the city at the same time.

Augusto De Luca

#83. My family were symphonic musicians and in the opera. Also, it was my era, the love of radio. We used to listen to the radio at night, close our eyes and see movies far more beautiful than you can photograph.

Francis Ford Coppola

#84. The photograph annihilates the person.

Siegfried Kracauer

#85. It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.

Paul Strand

#86. A camera alone does not make a picture. To make a picture you need a camera, a photographer and above all a subject. It is the subject that determines the interest of the photograph.

Man Ray

#87. His deceased wife, watches her husband from the photograph on his console desk.

David Mitchell

#88. Fantasy isn't something I put into the pictures; I don't try and inject them with a sense of play. But it's about being an honest photographer; a photograph is as much of a mirror of the photographer as it is the subject.

Tim Walker

#89. I just really wanted to do art, except when I was taking those photographs of people I would make the clothes that I would photograph them in so I could control the whole thing.

Stephen Sprouse

#90. My pictures are not really about the children that I photograph. They're more like actors in a film. I think you can always recognize the children, but they are alienated from their real appearance and become more like metaphors.

Loretta Lux

#91. A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand; but we do trust film, and shadows, and light.

John Updike

#92. One knows that frontal and/or profile photography is torn to pieces ... Inversely, what remains of the photograph must be seen as a fragment coming to fill a gap in the drawing.

Jean-Francois Lyotard

#93. Art has no place in modern life. It will continue to exist as long as there is a mania for the romantic and so long as there are people who love beautiful lies and deception ... Every modern cultured man must wage war against art, as against opium ... Photograph and be photographed.

Alexander Rodchenko

#94. If it is practiced by a man of taste, the photograph will have the appearance of art (but) the photographer must ... intervene as little as possible, so as not to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses.

Henri Matisse

#95. You want to make the photograph work in every way possible. Doesn't matter where it is in the world.

William Eggleston

#96. Steichen bought my first photographs that I ever sold. He recognized the style from the school of Black Mountain. After that, it was about twenty years before I sold another photograph.

Robert Rauschenberg

#97. In the photograph by my bed my mother is perpetually smiling on me. I guess I have forgiven us both, although sometimes in the night my dreams will take me back to the sadness, and I have to wake up and forgive us again.

Sue Monk Kidd

#98. A photograph is a mirror; mostly it reflects the prejudices of the viewer.

Bill Jay

#99. A man aboard one of the warships took a photograph, believed to be the last ever taken of the Lusitania,

Anonymous

#100. Judging by the photograph it seemed like I hadn't been there at all. As if it was my camera that had been on holiday, and not me.

Ida Lokas