Photo Quotes ArchiveQuotes about Photography > General (226 quotes)
"When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence."
Ansel Adams
Quote #1
"Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution."
Ansel Adams
Quote #2
"I wish more people felt that photography was an adventure the same as life itself and felt that their individual feelings were worth expressing. To me, that makes photography more exciting."
Harry Callahan
Quote #3
"A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed, and is, thereby, a true manifestation of what one feels about life in its entirety..."
Ansel Adams
Quote #4
"Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts."
Garry Winogrand
Quote #5
"My favorite thing is to go where I have never gone."
Diane Arbus
Quote #6
"A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know."
Diane Arbus
Quote #8
"A photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how the camera 'saw' a piece of time and space."
Garry Winogrand
Quote #11
"Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed."
Garry Winogrand
Quote #12
"I like to think of photographing as a two-way act of respect. Respect for the medium, by letting it do what it does best, describe. And respect for the subject, by describing it as it is. A photograph must be responsible to both."
Garry Winogrand
Quote #14
"There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described."
Garry Winogrand
Quote #15
"All things are photographable."
Garry Winogrand
Quote #16
"Keep it simple."
Alfred Eisenstaedt
Quote #18
"One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind."
Dorothea Lange
Quote #19
"The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding."
Edward Steichen
Quote #21
"To the complaint, 'There are no people in these photographs,' I respond, 'There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.' "
Ansel Adams
Quote #22
"A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask."
Susan Sontag
Quote #207
"Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual. "
Nickolas Muray
Quote #23
"No matter how slow the film, Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer It has chosen."
Minor White
Quote #24
"Be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence."
Minor White
Quote #25
"Often while traveling with a camera we arrive just as the sun slips over the horizon of a moment, too late to expose film, only time enough to expose our hearts."
Minor White
Quote #26
"Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory."
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Quote #27
"The simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression... In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a leitmotif."
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Quote #28
"Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter."
Oscar Wilde
Quote #29
"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
Quote #30
"Photography suits the temper of this age - of active bodies and minds. It is a perfect medium for one whose mind is teeming with ideas, imagery, for a prolific worker who would be slowed down by painting or sculpting, for one who sees quickly and acts decisively, accurately."
Edward Weston
Quote #32
"Photography to the amateur is recreation, to the professional it is work, and hard work too, no matter how pleasurable it my be."
Edward Weston
Quote #33
"Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees."
Paul Strand
Quote #34
"In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality. "
Alfred Stieglitz
Quote #35
"The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself. And that is the most complicated thing on earth"
Edward Steichen
Quote #36
"Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man."
Edward Steichen
Quote #37
"Photography is a small voice, at best, but sometimes one photograph, or a group of them, can lure our sense of awareness."
W. Eugene Smith
Quote #38
"Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever... it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything."
Aaron Siskind
Quote #39
"Of course I realize that photography is not the technical facility as much as it is the eye, and this decision that one makes for the moment at which you are going to snap, you know."
Ben Shahn
Quote #40
"In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated. "
August Sander
Quote #44
"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
Quote #47
"Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world."
Arnold Newman
Quote #48
"With photography, you zero in; you put a lot of energy into short moments, and then you go on to the next thing. "
Robert Mapplethorpe
Quote #49
"Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still."
Dorothea Lange
Quote #52
"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
Quote #53
"A picture is the expression of an impression. If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it?"
Ernst Haas
Quote #55
"Look at lots of exhibitions and books, and don't get hung up on cameras and technical things. Photography is about images."
Fay Godwin
Quote #60
"There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment. This kind of photography is realism. But realism is not enough - there has to be vision, and the two together can make a good photograph."
Robert Frank
Quote #61
"Black and white are the colors of photography. To me they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected. "
Robert Frank
Quote #63
"Once the amateur's naive approach and humble willingness to learn fades away, the creative spirit of good photography dies with it. Every professional should remain always in his heart an amateur."
Alfred Eisenstaedt
Quote #65
"Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography. "
George Eastman
Quote #66
"In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a leitmotiv."
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Quote #67
"Photography is still a very new medium and everything must be tried and dare... Photography has no rules. It is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it is achieved. "
Bill Brandt
Quote #69
"What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time."
John Berger
Quote #70
"Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art."
Ansel Adams
Quote #72
"As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs. Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment - this very moment - to stay."
Sam Abell
Quote #74
"Does not the very word 'creative' mean to build, to initiate, to give out, to act--rather than to be acted upon, to be subjective? Living photography is positive in its approach, it sings a song of life--not death."
Berenice Abbott
Quote #76
"Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past."
Berenice Abbott
Quote #77
"Photography helps people to see."
Berenice Abbott
Quote #78
"The best photographs are made by the best people."
Morley Baer
Quote #80
"Of what use are lens and light to those who lack in mind and sight?"
Anonymous
Quote #82
"While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see."
Dorothea Lange
Quote #83
"To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy."
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Quote #87
"Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality. It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term--selectivity."
Berenice Abbott
Quote #89
"What is the subject matter of this apparently very personal world? It has been suggested that these shapes and images are underworld characters, the inhabitants of the vast common realm of memories that have gone down below the level of conscious control. It may be they are. The degree of emotional involvement and the amount of free association with the material being photographed would point in that direction."
Aaron Siskind
Quote #92
"The business of making a photograph may be said in simple terms to consist of three elements: the objective world (whose permanent condition is change and disorder), the sheet of paper on which the picture will be realized, and the experience which brings them together."
Aaron Siskind
Quote #94
"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
Quote #100
"The photographic image... is a message without a code."
Roland Barthes
Quote #101
"Too many photographers try too hard. They try to lift photography into the realm of Art, because they have an inferiority complex about their craft. You and I would see more interesting photography if they would stop worrying, and instead, apply horse-sense to the problem of recording the look and feel of their own era."
Jessie Tarbox Beals
Quote #102
"A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there--even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity."
Doisneau Robert
Quote #103
"The magic of photography is metaphysical. What you see in the photograph isn't what you saw at the time. The real skill of photography is organized visual lying."
Terence Donovan
Quote #104
"Sometimes you can tell a large story with a tiny subject."
Eliot Porter
Quote #106
"Memory selects single important images, just as the camera does. In that manner both are able to isolate the highest moments of living."
Galen Rowell
Quote #108
"The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways."
Ansel Adams
Quote #110
"Black and white photography is truly quite a 'departure from reality', and the transition from one aspect of visual magic to another was not as complete as many imagine."
Ansel Adams
Quote #112
"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
Quote #117
"The basic material of photographs is not intrinsically beautiful. It's not like ivory or tapestry or bronze or oil on canvas. You're not supposed to look at the thing, you're supposed to look through it. It's a window."
John Szarkowski
Quote #121
"Photography is a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing. The contest can be held anywhere..."
John Szarkowski
Quote #123
"Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself."
Berenice Abbott
Quote #124
"If you are bored with your own photography you are really bored with what you are photographing, so pick a new subject about which you are knowledgeable and enthusiastic."
Bill Jay
Quote #133
"How many times have you done some kind of new work and felt moved by something odd and unfamiliar about it, knowing that this is it, the new thing? If you feel this happening, the trick is not to try to name it. Just keep it going as long as you can. Surf it if you can. Name it when you're done."
Sean Kernan
Quote #135
"To photograph the landscape more often, we must change Horace Greeley's exhortation from 'Go West, young man' to 'Go Home, young man'."
Joe Lipka
Quote #138
"Photograph and engage life as though it is very short. It is--as you will learn when you see how quickly the next ten years go by."
Brooks Jensen
Quote #140
"I have gradually confused photography with life."
Jerry Uelsmann
Quote #145
"A good photograph is knowing where to stand."
Ansel Adams
Quote #148
"There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs."
Ansel Adams
Quote #151
"Photography opens your eyes a little wider to the world around you."
Bill Jay
Quote #154
"But there are times when thinking is misplaced, like when taking photographs. You cannot think your way to making photographs; you can photograph your way to clearer thinking."
Bill Jay
Quote #155
"A photograph is a piece of proof because it’s an effect. It’s a natural effect of nature impressing on a photographic plate certain light rays that come from the fact that those people were there. It’s like a footprint. Now, a painting does something else. It might bring out some truth about a person, but it’s really the artist whose insight is operating there, and not nature."
Robert Sokolowski
Quote #158
"A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into."
Ansel Adams
Quote #159
"The medium of photography can record not only what the eyes see, but that which the mind’s eye sees as well. The camera is not only an extension of the eye, but of the brain. It can see sharper, farther, nearer, slower, faster than the eye. It can see by invisible light. It can see in the past, present, and future. Instead of using the camera only to reproduce objects, I wanted to use it to make what is invisible to the eye, visible."
Wynn Bullock
Quote #161
"In photography, you've got to be quick, quick, quick, quick...Like an animal and a prey."
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Quote #166
"The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box."
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Quote #167
"A good snapshot stops a moment from running away."
Eudora Welty
Quote #170
"The purpose of photography is the transmission of a visualized sector of life through the medium of the camera into a mental process that starts with the photographer's thinking about the subject he photographs and is continued in the mind of the spectator."
Roman Vishniac
Quote #171
"The pictures are there, and you just take them."
Robert Capa
Quote #173
"My point is that meaning is always personal, changeable and subjective. There is no 'correct' interpretation of a photograph."
Bill Jay
Quote #175
"Now the wonderful thing about photography ... is that it is intensely experiential. Simply put, to make a photograph you have to be there. But where exactly is 'there'?"
Ted Orland
Quote #180
"A good fine art photograph is one that makes the viewer so aware of the emotional content that the viewer is unaware of the print."
Brooks Jensen
Quote #182
"If photography is truly an art, then what it expresses is human emotion. Not what the world looks like. … It’s not about what's in front of you, it's about what's inside of you. ... Expression, that's what its all about. Artistic expression, not objective duplication. "
Brooks Jensen
Quote #183
"The lack of true sensitivity makes people withdraw as into a nutshell. It's basically all about the difference between shooting over the fence with a telephoto, and opening the door to introduce yourself, chat, eat and drink with the very hospitable people and send them a few photos afterwards."
Voicu Bojan
Quote #186
"Producing a photographic document involves preparation in excess. There is first the examination of the idea of the project. Then the visits to the scene, the casual conversations, and more formal interviews - talking, and listening, and looking, looking. ... And finally, the pictures themselves, each one planned, talked, taken and examined in terms of the whole."
Aaron Siskind
Quote #187
"Words of wisdom for every photographer: 'Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking'. So said Goethe."
Bill Jay
Quote #200
"One might compare the art of photography to the act of pointing. It must be true that some of us point to more interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations than others. [...] The talented practitioner of the new discipline would perform with a special grace, sense of timing, narrative sweep, and wit, thus endowing the act not merely with intelligence, but with that quality of formal rigor that identifies a work of art, so that we would be uncertain, when remembering the adventure of the tour, how much our pleasure and sense of enlargement had come from the things pointed to and how much from a pattern created by the pointer."
John Szarkowski
Quote #202
"Luck is the attentive photographer's best teacher."
John Szarkowski
Quote #203
"In practice a photographer does not concern himself with philosophical issues while working; he makes photographs, working with subject matter that he thinks will make the pictures."
John Szarkowski
Quote #204
"Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one's cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite."
John Szarkowski
Quote #205
"They were ... pure and unadulterated photographs, and sometimes they hinted at the existence of visual truths that had escaped all other systems of detection."
John Szarkowski
Quote #206
"The thing that’s fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike."
Imogen Cunningham
Quote #210
"…There are too many people studying it [photography] now who are never going to make it. You can’t give them a formula for making it. You have to have it in you first, you don’t learn it. The seeing eye is the important thing."
Imogen Cunningham
Quote #211
"The enemy of photography is the convention, the fixed rules of 'how to do'. The salvation of photography comes from the experiment."
Anonymous
Quote #214
"Photography teaches that how well you see has nothing to do with how well you see."
Anonymous
Quote #215
"Good photography speaks through silence."
Anonymous
Quote #220
"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
Quote #224
"[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
Quote #225
"It can happen anytime, anywhere. I mean, you don't have to be in front of stuff that's going to make a good photograph. It's possible anywhere."
Henry Wessel
Quote #226
"The fundamental belief in the authenticity of photographs explains why photographs of people no longer living and of vanished architecture are so melancholy."
Beaumont Newhall
Quote #240
"If the historian will be faithful to the photograph, the photograph will be faithful to history."
Beaumont Newhall
Quote #242
"More and more are turning to photography as a medium of expression as well as communication. The leavening of aesthetic approaches continues. While it is too soon to define the characteristic of the photographic style today, one common denominator, rooted in tradition, seems in the ascendancy. The direct use of the camera for what it can do best, and that is the revelation, interpretation, and discovery of the world of man and of nature. The greatest challenge to the photographer is to express the inner significance through the outward form."
Beaumont Newhall
Quote #243
"Most musicians I know don't just play music on Saturday night. They play music every day. They are always fiddling around, letting the notes lead them from one place to another. Taking still photographs is like that. It is a generative process. It pulls you along."
Henry Wessel
Quote #245
"The process of photographing is a pleasure: eyes open, receptive, sensing, and at some point, connecting. It's thrilling to be outside your mind, your eyes far ahead of your thoughts."
Henry Wessel
Quote #248
"Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment."
Ansel Adams
Quote #261
"Photography is this incredible niche thing. You are either sort of into photography or you’re not."
Brooks Jensen
Quote #264
"The destination of the photograph is to reveal what something or somebody looked like, under a particular set of conditions, at a particular moment in time, and to transmit the results to others."
David Hurn
Quote #267
"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
Quote #269
"The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?"
Edward Weston
Quote #279
"Many photographers think they are photographing nature when they are only caricaturing her. "
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Quote #285
"Though many painters and sculptors talk glibly of "going in for photography," you will find that very few of them can ever make a picture by photography; they lack the science, technical knowledge, and above all the practice. Most people think they can play tennis, shoot, write novels, and photograph as well as any other person -- until they try."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Quote #288
"Do not call yourself an "artist-photographer" and make "artist-painters" and "artist-sculptors" laugh; call yourself a photographer and wait for artists to call you brother."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Quote #290
"You know you are seeing such a photograph if you say to yourself, "I could have taken that picture. I've seen such a scene before, but never like that." It is the kind of photography that relies for its strengths not on special equipment or effects but on the intensity of the photographer's seeing. It is the kind of photography in which the raw materials--light, space, and shape--are arranged in a meaningful and even universal way that gives grace to ordinary objects."
Sam Abell
Quote #298
"But there is more to a fine photograph than information. We are also seeking to present an image that arouses the curiosity of the viewer or that, best of all, provokes the viewer to think--to ask a question or simply to gaze in thoughtful wonder. We know that photographs inform people. We also know that photographs move people. The photograph that does both is the one we want to see and make. It is the kind of picture that makes you want to pick up your own camera again and go to work."
Sam Abell
Quote #301
"Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst."
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Quote #305
"While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph."
Lewis Hine
Quote #311
"Photography can light-up darkness and expose ignorance."
Lewis Hine
Quote #312
"There is no such thing as taking too much time, because your soul is in that picture."
Ruth Bernhard
Quote #317
"To take photographs means to recognize-simultaneously and within a fraction of a second-both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one’s head, one’s eye and one’s heart on the same axis."
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Quote #325
"I have discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn."
Pablo Picasso
Quote #323
"One of the biggest mistakes a photographer can make is to look at the real world and cling to the vain hope that next time his film will somehow bear a closer resemblance to it…If we limit our vision to the real world, we will forever be fighting on the minus side of things, working only too make our photographs equal to what we see out there, but no better."
Galen Rowell
Quote #327
"A photograph can at once be completely literal (as in some sense it must be) and yet entirely ambiguous"
Eric Fredine
Quote #328
"Every photograph is a battle of form versus content."
Garry Winogrand
Quote #332
"Great photography is always on the edge of failure."
Garry Winogrand
Quote #333
"A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.
"
Richard Avedon
Quote #340
"Photography has always reminded me of the second child.. trying to prove itself. The fact that it wasn’t really considered an art.. that it was considered a craft.. has trapped almost every serious photographer.
"
Richard Avedon
Quote #344
"I think that emotional content is an image's most important element, regardless of the photographic technique. Much of the work I see these days lacks the emotional impact to draw a reaction from viewers, or remain in their hearts."
Anne Geddes
Quote #347
"The hardest thing in photography is to create a simple image."
Anne Geddes
Quote #348
"The trouble with flowers is that invariably, when I'm ready to photograph them, they are not in season."
Anne Geddes
Quote #350
"While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects)– a material vestigate of its subject in a way that no painting can be… Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross."
Susan Sontag
Quote #364
"There is an analogy which I like to use: When I landscaped my garden I needed to plant trees. I could have obtained an instant tree by collecting an assortment of trunks, branches, twigs and leaves and assembling the bits. But the tree would be dead; it would never grow into something else. So the starting point was a sapling which, by careful nurturing, and a good deal of patience, will grow into a tree, often into a form which could not have been predicted. It seems to me that it is the same with a body of work, of any merit, in photography. The greatest scope for deep-rooted, organic growth begins with the simplest of premises: the direct visual encounter with a selected subject."
David Hurn
Quote #365
"Once photography enters your bloodstream, it's like a disease."
Anonymous
Quote #367
"Pictures are wasted unless the motive power which impelled you to action is strong and stirring."
Berenice Abbott
Quote #375
"If you are not passionately devoted to an idea, you can make very pleasant pictures but they won't make you cry."
Ruth Bernhard
Quote #376
"Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood."
Susan Sontag
Quote #378
"It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking pictures is soothing and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel."
Susan Sontag
Quote #379
"To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt."
Susan Sontag
Quote #380
"There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept."
Ansel Adams
Quote #383
"Pictures you have taken have an influence on those that you are going to make. That's life!"
John Sexton
Quote #387
"The photo is a thing in itself. And that's what still photography is all about."
Garry Winogrand
Quote #392
"You can find pictures anywhere. It's simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what's around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy."
Elliott Erwitt
Quote #393
"Let me here call attention to one of the most universally popular mistakes that have to do with photography - that of classing supposedly excellent work as professional, and using the term amateur to convey the idea of immature productions and to excuse atrociously poor photographs. 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; and viewed in this light the incorrectness of the popular classification is readily apparent."
Alfred Stieglitz
Quote #397
"The ability to make a truly artistic photograph is not acquired off-hand, but is the result of an artistic instinct coupled with years of labor."
Alfred Stieglitz
Quote #398
"You learn to see by practice. ... The more you look around at things, the more you see. The more you photograph, the more you realize what can be photographed and what can't be photographed. You just have to keep doing it."
Eliot Porter
Quote #405
"Portraits are the most intimate photographs. The image will survive the subject."
Victor Skrebneski
Quote #408
"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
Quote #409
"The medium of photography adapts itself to whoever you are."
Nell Dorr
Quote #411
"Many pictures turn out to be limp translations of the known world instead of vital objects which create an intrinsic world of their own. There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph."
Robert Heinecken
Quote #413
"There is no art which affords less opportunity to execute expression than photography. Everything is concentrated in a few seconds, when after perhaps an hours seeking, waiting, and hesitation, the photographer sees the realization of his inward vision, and in that moment he has one advantage over most arts - his medium is swift enough to record his momentary inspiration."
Sadakichi Hartmann
Quote #414
"The meaning of quality in photography's best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system."
Walker Evans
Quote #415
"Leaving aside the mysteries and the inequities of human talent, brains, taste, and reputations, the matter of art in photography may come down to this: it is the capture and projection of the delights of seeing; it is the defining of observation full and felt. "
Walker Evans
Quote #416
"A photograph is not merely a substitute for a glance. It is a sharpened vision. It is the revelation of new and important facts."
Sid Grossman
Quote #420
"When you see it, photograph it. Don't wait. It may not be there when you find you're ready to make the picture."
Brooks Jensen
Quote #431
"The greatest photographs are made by artists who pickup the camera, rather than by photographers who decide to make art."
Stewart Harvey
Quote #432
"Wherever there is light, one can photograph. "
Alfred Stieglitz
Quote #434
"The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art; but granted that it is an art, reliance should be placed unreservedly upon those possibilities, that they may be made to yield the fullest results."
Alfred Stieglitz
Quote #437
"We never see a photograph all at once. Our vision doesn't work that way. ... We have to look at all the parts of the photograph and then assemble it in our minds eye. This is the one of the fascinating things about good art work. It always brings forth that element of imagination and requires you to use your mind to really see it, because your eye can't possible see it all."
Brooks Jensen
Quote #440
"All the great fine art photograph in the world share this common theme of being an intersection between an image and an idea. ... It's ideas that are the source of great photographs, not merely time and place."
Brooks Jensen
Quote #445
"If you’re photographing in color you show the color of their clothes – if you use black and white, you will show the color of their soul."
Anonymous
Quote #450
"Photography is Photography; And in it's purity and innocence is far too uniquely, valuable and beautiful to be spoilt by making it imitate something else."
Frederick H. Evans
Quote #453
"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
Quote #456
"...throughout the history of art it has been art itself - in all its forms - that has inspired art...today's photographs are so geared to life that one can learn more from them than from life itself."
Van Deren Coke
Quote #457
"A good photograph is like a good hound dog, dumb, but eloquent."
Eugene Atget
Quote #461
"Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper the photographer begins with the finished product."
Edward Steichen
Quote #465
"When somehow the atmosphere becomes alive with fog, or clouds, or rain, or lightening, or dust blown in the air, or high puffy clouds in the sky...that's the time that great photographs can be made outdoors. Isn't it interesting what an important component of photographs is the simple atmosphere in which we live. That's supposedly transparent but becomes alive in a photograph in when it's not."
Brooks Jensen
Quote #466
"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
Quote #464
"So why are Picture square? ... An example of a simple question, with a complicated answer. And maybe, just maybe, an opportunity for creativity."
Brooks Jensen
Quote #473
"...the best photographs you make will be the things you are most passionate about. Go photograph those things that you really care about deeply. And they will probably be much better photographs than the photographs you make about things that you are not truly, deeply passionate."
Brooks Jensen
Quote #474
"Too much of photography is about photographers. That is to say, the creative act in photography is supposedly the photographer's skill in seeing what others do not, but this is simply not sufficient - and can lead to a lot of trite photography."
Brooks Jensen
Quote #477
"Photography is not about what we see; photography is about [what] we make. A person who sees, but can't paint, is not a painter; a painter is someone who creates a painting. A person who hears, but can't write music, is not a composer; a composer is one who creates music. Even so, painting is not about the manipulation of paint; composing is not about the manipulation of notes. In all arts - including photography - what counts is what a person makes, and - most importantly - what a person expresses. It's not seeing, it's expressing that makes photography art."
Brooks Jensen
Quote #478
"You don't take a photograph, you make it."
Ansel Adams
Quote #493
"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
Quote #494
"There's a rapport that any photographer is going to have with his subject matter. And if you don't have a rapport, you're going to find the task of photographing it difficult."
Bruce Barnbaum
Quote #496
"I had learned a valuable lesson: Show your work to a hundred different people and you will get a hundred different opinions, none of them correct and all of them valid. All their opinions are valid because when someone tells you whether or not they like your work, there is no way to argue with that - to do so would only question their taste, not tell you about your work."
Brooks Jensen
Quote #503
"That's one of the problems of photography, it tends to be a surface sort of thing if we are not careful. Because it's just snap a picture and move on; take a picture and move on. Make a picture of what something looks like, but that's not at all what photography is. We have to learn to photograph not what it is but what else it is."
Brooks Jensen
Quote #507
"It's one thing to make a picture of what a person looks like, it's another thing to make a portrait of who they are."
Paul Caponigro
Quote #508
"A kind of golden hour one remembers for a life time... Everything was touched with magic. "
Margaret Bourke-White
Quote #518
"Photography is not a sport. It has no rules. Everything must be dared and tried! "
Bill Brandt
Quote #519
"All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's ) mortality, vulnerability, mutability."
Susan Sontag
Quote #531
"Let the subject generate its own photographs. Become a camera."
Minor White
Quote #532
"Photographs are about transitory experience. They capture a moment of the present, but always preserve it as a part of the past. All photographs are about the past. They are about a moment that is gone, and not to be relived. But can be frozen in time through the photographic document."
Jeff Curto
Quote #537
"The essence of creative photography is in us - not in the camera, not in the subject, not in the technology, not in the photographic artifact. And, by extension, because each one of us is a different and unique person, our response to a place - i.e., a photographic subject - is (or can be) unique, too."
Brooks Jensen
Quote #546
"I would exchange every painting of Christ for one snapshot."
George Bernard Shaw
Quote #547
"There is so much more to the things that we think we know from afar. The close you get the more complex it is, not the simpler it is to understand."
Susan Meiselas
Quote #548
"When you're photographing anything to do with war and conflict you're photographing something impossible. Everything you do is just clumsy and stupid and half witted. Because it is impossible to portray the full width and breadth of everything that youare up against."
Simon Norfolk
Quote #550
"Photographs have become important in a different way. The medium has, by it's nature, become a more reflective look at things. Generally photographer arrive in places after the event now, rather than at the event. During a real event you have TV crews up at the front. Then the photographers come in and make something more of an analysis of the event."
Oliver Chanarin
Quote #551
"Even if not a single picture is never published, they exist. And that means that we are recording the history of the human race. If that's all your doing, it still a very very worth while profession to be involved in."
Philip Jones Griffiths
Quote #552
"I don't know whether we think in moving images or whether we think in still images. I have a suspicion that on our hard drive, our series within our brains, [exist] still photographs of very important moments in our lives. ... That we think in terms of still images and that what the photography is doing is making direct contact with the human hard drive and recording for all time a sense of what happened."
Jon Snow
Quote #555
"To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power."
Susan Sontag
Quote #556
"Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed."
Susan Sontag
Quote #558
"Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. "
Susan Sontag
Quote #560
"In contrast to the written account-which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership-a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all."
Susan Sontag
Quote #561
"While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) - a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be... Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross. "
Susan Sontag
Quote #562
"It takes the passage of time before an image of a commonplace subject can be assessed. The great difficulty of what I attempt is seeing beyond the moment; the everydayness of life gets in the way of the eternal."
George Tice
Quote #564
"If we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear - but the closest scrutiny of the photogenic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented."
Edgar Allen Poe
Quote #565
"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
Quote #567
"Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks."
Roland Barthes
Quote #568
"'The necessary condition for an image is sight,' Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.'"
Roland Barthes
Quote #569
"The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art."
Roland Barthes
Quote #570
"In a foreign country it is far from easy to study a scene at length when you know that at any minute someone may appear and ask what you are doing and that you can't answer, and you haven't many references, and you don't know the law. Neither is it easy to find and know the subjects for portraits or comfortable to make such picture when you cannot apply an anesthesia of small talk. "
Robert Adams
Quote #579
"... If we consider the difference between William Henry Jackson packing in his camera by mule, and the person stepping for a moment from his car to take a picture with his Instamatic, it becomes clear how some of our space has vanished; if the time it takes to cross space is a way by which we define it, then to arrive at a view of space 'in no time' is to have denied its reality."
Robert Adams
Quote #581
"We rely, I think, on landscape photography to make intelligible to us what we already know."
Robert Adams
Quote #584
"Photography today appears to be in a state of flight... The familiar is made strange, the unfamiliar grotesque. The amateur forces his Sundays into a series of unnatural poses. "
Dorothea Lange
Quote #586
"The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and its object: dualities we can conceive but not perceive... Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see."
Roland Barthes
Quote #588
"What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially."
Roland Barthes
Quote #589
"Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation. A photograph is a result of the photographer's decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless."
John Berger
Quote #590
"In previous ages the word 'art' was used to cover all forms of human skill. The Greeks believed that these skills were given by the gods to man for the purpose of improving the condition of life. In a real sense, photography has fulfilled the Greek ideal of art; it should not only improve the photographer, but also improve the world."
David Hurn
Quote #607
"...the subject, the thing itself, is the genesis of all types of photography."
Bill Jay
Quote #610
"The development of a love of medium and a responsibility for one's own pictures is an overall goal."
Minor White
Quote #615
"Photography is a language more universal than words."
Minor White
Quote #616
"At first glance a photograph can inform us. At second glance it can reach us."
Minor White
Quote #617
"I've always felt there are a large reservoir of people who have wonderful artistic vision but who lack the technical skills to manifest their vision in a recalcitrant and stubborn medium where molecules and the rules of physics and chemistry conspire to make things difficult. "
Brooks Jensen
Quote #621
"A face is not a portrait. My feeling is that a portrait of someone is not just what they look like, but include who they are."
Brooks Jensen
Quote #622
"A photograph of a person must definitely go well beyond what a person looks like. ... I try to go beyond what a person looks like and to capture the essence of what a person is like."
Eugene H. Johnson
Quote #623 |
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