Photo Quotes Archive

"The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera."

"A camera has interesting ideas of its own."

"The best zoom lens is your legs."

"The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh."

"The camera cannot lie, but it cannot help being selective."

"Best wide-angle lens? Two steps backward. Look for the 'ah-ha'."

"The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it."

"Never forget that all the great photographs in history were made with more primitive camera equipment than you currently own."

"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"."

"The fact is that relatively few photographers ever master their medium. Instead they allow the medium to master them and go on an endless squirrel cage chase from new lens to new paper to new developer to new gadget, never staying with one piece of equipment long enough to learn its full capacities, becoming lost in a maze of technical information that is of little or no use since they don't know what to do with it."

"The camera is not an instrument of preservation, the image is."

"It matters little how much equipment we use; it matters much that we be masters of all we do use."

"Never ever say the word shoot when you are taking a picture with a camera because a camera is not a violent weapon."

"I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything."

"I was extravagant in the matter of cameras – anything photographic – I had to have the best. But that was to further my work. In most things I have gone along with the plainest – or without. "

"People are under the illusion that it's easy...Technically, it is complex. You have a million options with equipment to distract you. I tell my students to simplify their equipment."

"No photographer is as good as the simplest camera."

"A camera can get you close without the burden of commitment. It's a nifty device that way, a magical passport into people's lives with no permanent strings attached. "

"Our morals dwindle as our cameras become smaller. (opinion of a writer in 1903)"

"Image quality is not the product of a machine, but of the person who directs the machine, and there are no limits to imagination and expression."

"This is the same problem I have with digital photography. The potential is always remarkable. But the medium never settles. Each year there is a better camera to buy and new software to download. The user never has time to become comfortable with the tool. Consequently too much of the work is merely about the technology. The HDR and QTVR fads are good examples. Instead of focusing on the subject, users obsess over RAW conversion, Photoshop plug-ins, and on and on. For good work to develop the technology needs to become as stable and functional as a typewriter."

"I often see the materials of photography as being a type of terrain. Emulsions, liquid developers, silver salts, and fixers interact, and I construct a landscape that I need to first explore in my mind’s eye if I am to make it manifest as an artful image in silver."

"I want the stark beauty that a lens can so exactly render presented without interference of artistic effect."

"The camera is a remarkable instrument. Saturate yourself with your subject, and the camera will all but take you by the hand and point the way. "

"It is essential for the photographer to know the effect of his lenses. The lens is his eye, and it makes or ruins his pictures. A feeling for composition is a great asset. I think it is very much a matter of instinct. It can perhaps be developed, but I doubt if it can be learned. To achieve his best work, the young photographer must discover what really excites him visually. He must discover his own world. "

"The camera is, at it's root, a complex recording device. It is a mirror to the world - and a reasonably efficient machine for making images copies of the world it reflects. The camera is not a creative being, but the human who wields it is."

"98% of all cameras and lenses are sharper than 99% of all photographers."

"Be gentle and tolerant. Intimacy will grow, but will take time and cannot be rushed. If all goes well, soon you will become more familiar with each other, and handling will forge awkward fumbling and fondling into more satisfying and productive caresses and eventually into a comfortable working partnership. At this stage you will be ready to accompany your new camera into the world."

"When people ask what equipment I use - I tell them my eyes."

"Keep this in mind the next time you are tempted to think that your creative output would be doubled if you just spent the rent money on a better camera. Better you should spend a fraction of that total on a few more photography books so you can study the images therein to better use the camera you already have."

"A camera is a save button for the mind's eye."

"Photography has not changed since its origin except in its technical aspects, which for me are not important. "

"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."