Top 100 World Photography Quotes
#1. How high your awareness level is determines how much meaning you get from your world. Photography can teach you to improve your awareness level.
Ansel Adams
#2. Photography is like a found object. A photographer never makes an actual subject; they just steal the image from the world ... Photography is a system of saving memories. It's a time machine, in a way, to preserve the memory, to preserve time.
Hiroshi Sugimoto
#3. I had no agent, and I was getting approached by so many people that I tried to escape for a while because I couldn't believe that world. Photography is not an industry, and suddenly an industry came to me, so I sort of had to accept it in the end and get an agent.
Anton Corbijn
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. The function of the photographer is to help people understand the world around them.
Sid Grossman
#8. Photography, to me, is the dewdrop that reflects my inner and outer worlds simultaneously.
Raghubir Singh
#9. Oh my goodness gracious, what you can buy off the Internet in terms of overhead photography. A trained ape can know an awful lot of what is going on in this world, just by punching on his mouse, for a relatively modest cost.
Donald Rumsfeld
#10. Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.
Steven Pinker
#11. Without my photography life would be boring. Photography adds an extra dimension to my life. Somehow it confirms my place in the world
Rennie Ellis
#12. Photography forces one out into the world, interacting with people and the environment. It flexes all those right brain, spatially-adept muscles.
Deborah Copaken Kogan
#13. Photography has fooled the world. There's no more convincing fraud. Its images are nothing but the expression of the invisible man working behind the camera. They are not reality, they form part of the language of culture.
Edmundo Desnoes
#14. 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
#15. I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us, which can mold us, but which can also be affected by us. A balance must be established between these two worlds - the one inside us and the one outside us.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#16. There are religions in which the representation of the world is banned as an usurpation of the power of a God, creator of all things. It is very possible that photography is a trick of the devil and each shot is a sin.
Joan Fontcuberta
#17. I like to work in the real world, so I do a lot of searching or just simple looking. But I'm not above tweaking reality and making something up. I don't think there are any rules in art. It's not so much what you see as it is the significance you, the artist, see in it.
Keith Carter
#18. It's up to us as photographers to give voice to the natural world.
Frans Lanting
#19. Born Berlin 1931, Germany, father a British diplomat, mother an American artist. Educated at various schools all over the world. 1958 Settled down to live in London. 1966 Became interested in photography through photographing my young children. No formal training.
Fay Godwin
#20. Photography has always been a major part of my vision: my excuse for meddling with what the world looks like.
Robert Rauschenberg
#21. On many days my primary artistic struggle is, in fact, photography because it is harder to do good work with that. I see myself as an observer of the world who has a strong drive to testify, which I can do because I have the privilege of living in New York with enough food to eat and shelter.
Teju Cole
#22. I like photography and writing and travel, so I have a lot of cerebral occupations. I am going to become a sailor and do a world tour on my yacht if I don't get any more work.
Audrey Tautou
#23. We have - through a hundred years of photography and two decades of film - been enormously enriched ... We may say we see the world with entirely different eyes.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
#24. Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come again exactly as it is today.
Edward Abbey
#25. I opened up Shutterstock to the whole world. I created a contributor community that anyone could give stock photography a shot.
Jon Oringer
#26. The world of the cinema and of painting are very different; precisely, the possibilities of photography and the cinema reside in that unlimited fantasy which is born of things themselves ... a piece of sugar can become on the screen larger than an infinite perspective of gigantic buildings.
Salvador Dali
#27. [Photography was necessary to] make my place in the art-world: in order to do this, I had to make a picture, since a picture was what a gallery or museum was meant to hold (all the while, of course, I was claiming that I was denying the standard, rejecting it ... )
Vito Acconci
#28. Think clearly, act sensibly, commit yourself to caring and work hard in order to discover joy. Then give the images back to the world from which they were taken.
Bill Jay
#29. Despite having been awarded the dubious honor of arthood, all photography is still perceived as having one foot in the real world, a toe in the chilly waters of verisimilitude, no matter how often it is demonstrated that photographs can and do lie.
Lucy R. Lippard
#30. I am trying to make some kind of connection to what is going on in the world, to make some sort of contact. And I use the instruments that our modern world offers, these extraordinary instruments of photography and film and computers.
Leon Golub
#31. Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.
Susan Sontag
#32. The idea of photography as evidence is pure bullshit. A photo is no more proof of any reality than what you may hear being said by someone in a bus. We only record details, small fragments of the world.
Marc Riboud
#33. I was going round the world searching for an interesting place, when I realized that the place that I was in was already interesting.
Emmet Gowin
#34. I take pleasure in working with the non-art photographs that reside in public archives, essentially authorless and owned by the world itself, because I find the world of fine art photography to be pretty silly and pretentious.
Michael Light
#35. You cannot explain the whole world in one photograph. Photography pretends. You can see everything that's in front of the camera, but there's always something beside it.
Thomas Ruff
#36. Above all, the photographs I use are not arty in any sense of the word. I think photography is dead as fine art; its only place is in the commercial world, for technical or information purposes.
Edward Ruscha
#37. There's a reductiveness to photography, of course - in the framing of reality and the exclusion of chunks of it (the rest of the world, in fact). It's almost as if the act of photography bears some relationship to how we consciously manage the uncontrollable set of possibilities that exist in life.
Philip-Lorca DiCorcia
#38. Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.
Susan Sontag
#39. Photography cannot change the world, but it can show the world, especially when it changes.
Marc Riboud
#40. I think that's necessary in photography. We try to simplify the chaos that's out there - and that's true of the natural world as well as the mad-made world. Clearly, it's easier in the mad-made world because it has already been structured.
Bruce Barnbaum
#41. There is no such thing as a secret - not really, not in the modern world, not with photography and telegraphy and railways and newspaper presses.
Robert Harris
#42. [Photography] remains servile to a thoughtless vision of the world ... As the term snapshot suggests, photography seizes the moment and exhibits it.
Claude Levi-Strauss
#43. There's no more important mission, because it's folly to think that we can doom wildlife to oblivion and believe humans will be just fine. That's a world I hope to never lay eyes upon.
Joel Sartore
#44. When the world asks "what was it like?" Only the photographer can say "See!
Mark Denman
#45. With a camera like that you don't believe you're in the masterpiece business. It's enough to be able to peck at the world.
Lee Friedlander
#46. I love writing and photography and the natural world that inspires them both. I'm working on getting as lost as I can in the beauty before it is completely wiped clean by the madness of man.
Jason Reeves
#47. Photographers can either look out the window at the world or they can look in the mirror.
David Alan Harvey
#48. Many people misunderstand me - I'm quite happy to be called a photographer. All of a sudden, the art world has caught up with photography, and they are trying to hijack us.
Don McCullin
#49. If the photographer isn't going to pay attention to the picture he is making, that if he thinks the camera is just a machine and not an avenue of expression, then he has no business asking anyone for anything, let alone their time and interest. Don't show the world, he said, invent the world.
Whitney Otto
#50. I believe photography is a tool to express our positive assessment of the world. A tool to acquire ultimate happiness and belief.
Ansel Adams
#51. I'm afraid we get a great deal of our exposure to art through magazines and through slides and I think this is dreadful, this is anti-art because art is direct experience with something in the world and photography is just a rumor, a kind of pornography of art.
Carl Andre
#52. In photography we possess an extraordinary instrument for reproduction. But photography is much more than that. Today it is [a method for bringing optically] some thing entirely new into the world.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
#53. There are those photographers who have made a whole career doing commercial work but have never had a museum show, and then there are others who've only had museum shows but couldn't survive for five seconds in the real world of photography. But I've done absolutely everything.
Duane Michals
#54. It's almost too perfect - the poster girl for an illness in the early days of photography sees the world in black and white.
Siri Hustvedt
#55. Kodachrome, it gives us those nice bright colors
Gives us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah!
I got a Nikon camera, I love to take a photograph
So momma, don't take my Kodachrome away ...
Paul Simon
#56. Often when I walked alone in the mountains, I tried to make sense out of the two halves of my life. What went on in the city during the week seemed chaotic and unrelated to the events in my mountain world.
Galen Rowell
#57. Photography is my method for defining the confusing world that rushes constantly toward me. It is my defensive attempt to reduce our daily chaos to a set of understandable images.
Arthur Tress
#58. I felt like I was in the best photography school in the world - I had Herb Ritts, Bruce Weber, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn teach me.
Helena Christensen
#59. By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.
Susan Sontag
#60. Behind the lens, I found refuge and freedom, distance and connection, an intoxicating way to tame the huge, chaotic world.
Judith Kelman
#61. Most of Tina Modotti's work that is known to the photography world was done in Mexico in the years 1923 through 1926, when she lived and worked with Edward Weston.
John Szarkowski
#62. The world of your photography is limitless-just like your backyard.
Nick Kelsh
#63. Photography is like an open book to the world.
Lisa Jones
#64. I hope that my work will encourage self expression in others and stimulate the search for beauty and creative excitement in the great world around us.
Ansel Adams
#65. This is the hardest stuff in the world to photograph. You need a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree lens, or something. You see it, and then you look down in the ground glass and it's just nothing. As soon as you put a border on it, it's gone.
Robert M. Pirsig
#67. Photography is such an important instrument in the education of our feelings and perception because of its duality. Photography represents the world we know, and suggests a world beyond what we can see. Creativity is the gap between perception and knowledge.
Emmet Gowin
#68. The urge to create, the urge to photograph, comes in part from the deep desire to live with more integrity, to live more in peace with the world, and possibly to help others to do the same.
Wynn Bullock
#69. Most people feel that the world looks like the photograph. I've always assumed that the photograph is nearly right, but that little bit by which it misses makes it miss by a mile. This is what I grope at.
Martin Gayford
#70. This photographic thing has changed the entire vision of the world. It will go through every activity of humanity - science, medicine, space, ESP, for peace, against peace, entertainment, television, movies, all of them - you will not find one without photography.
Lisette Model
#71. Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work.
Martin Parr
#72. It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#73. My creative process begins when I get out with the camera and interact with the world. A camera is truly a license to explore. There are no uninteresting things. There are just uninterested people.
Jerry Uelsmann
#74. Photography, too, reduces the world to strips and rectangles; photographers scrutinize the surfaces of reality in hope of unlocking the potential for significance that is latent within them.
Frank Gohlke
#75. "Simply look with perceptive eyes at the world about you, and trust to your own reactions and convictions. Ask yourself: "Does this subject move me to feel, think and dream? Can I visualize a print - my own personal statement of what I feel and want to convey - from the subject before me?""
Ansel Adams
#76. When I make a photograph I want it to be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order (unlike the world of events and actions whose permanent condition is change and disorder).
Aaron Siskind
#77. I meet young artists and it becomes clear that with some the main motivation is getting a show in Chelsea. It strikes me that this is very different to the way it was for me, which was that I wanted to understand photography and the world and myself.
Stephen Shore
#78. Photography is a magical kind of art that allows people to preserve time and moments, and to describe the world the way they see it.
Sahara Sanders
#79. The changes taking place in this part of Europe are enormous and very rapid. One world is disappearing. I am trying to photograph what's left. I have always been drawn to what is ending, what will soon no longer exist.
Josef Koudelka
#80. Before the first press pictures, the ordinary man would visualize only those events that took place near him, on his street or in his village. Photography opened a window. As the reader's outlook expanded, the world began to shrink.
Gisele Freund
#81. If only I had thought of a Kodak! I could have flashed that glimpse of the Under-world in a second, and examined it at leisure.
H.G.Wells
#82. Part of the role of photography is to exaggerate, and that is an aspect that I have to puncture. I do that by showing the world as I really find it.
Martin Parr
#83. [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.
#84. Realism and superrealism are what I'm after. This world is full of things the eye doesn't see. The camera can see more, and often 10 times better.
Andreas Feininger
#85. I'm glad i found photography. It's a way to connect with the world.
Susan Wiggs
#86. Photography, as an invention, was both art and science. The view it gave us of the world was in some measure acceptable because it was a product of our vision of the world; and it did so as part of the same process which seemed to impart 'truth': science.
Joseph Kosuth
#87. Making these photographs has often seemed to me like a kind of dance. Often I have danced badly and the world has fallen apart at my feet. But sometimes the dance has gone well and my subject and I have moved together as if with shared purpose.
Keith Carter
#88. Ome INSIDE is home shining brightly above all homes in physical world.
Christina Westover
#89. I think that any photographer is an investigator. Photography is a pretext to know the world, to know life. To know yourself.
Graciela Iturbide
#90. All the technique in the world doesn't compensate for the inability to notice.
Elliott Erwitt
#91. I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.
Garry Winogrand
#92. 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
#94. Taking a picture is like giving a piece of your soul away. You allow other people to see the world through your eyes.
Katja Michael
#95. Photography can strip from the world that spiritual dust and grime with which our eyes have covered it.
Andre Bazin
#96. What attracts me in photography is not so much a fine arts approach, but rather photographs as documents ... All the ways in which human beings have documented the world in an attempt to order it, in an attempt to consume it or rule it or hang on to it in some sense.
Zoe Leonard
#97. To make good photographs, to express something, to contribute something to the world he lives in, and to contribute something to the art of photography besides imitations of the best photographers on the market today, that is basic training, the understanding of self.
Edward Steichen
#98. Human experience comes suspended in the sickly-sweet amniotic fluid of commercial photography. And a world normally animated by abrasive differences is blithely reduced to a single, homogeneous National Geographic way of seeing.
Geoffrey Batchen
#99. I didn't do so well in the academic world, so I think the only way I could express myself was through visual art - anything I could get my hands on, whether it was glassblowing, sculpture, painting, or photography. I always wanted to be a painter. Or a farmer.
Steven Klein
#100. And for the world's orphans. A portion of this book's proceeds will go to you.
Stacy Wasmuth
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