168 Art Photography Quotes

Following is our list of art photography quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about photography street art.

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Famous Art Photography Quotes

Landscapes, heads and naked women are called artistic photography, while photographs of current events are called press photography. — Alexander Rodchenko

Photography has every right and every merit to claim our attention as the art of our age. — Alexander Rodchenko

Photography is the recording of strangeness and beauty with beguiling precision. — Sebastian Smee

Photography is the recording of strangeness and beauty with beguiling precision. — Sebastian Smeey

Some people's photography is an art. Not mine. Art is a dirty word in photography. All this fine art crap is killing it already. — Helmut Newton

Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution. — Ansel Adams

There are two dirty words in photography, one is art, the other is good taste — Helmut Newton

Photography - the new, rapid, concrete reflector of the world - should surely undertake to show the world from all vantage points, and to develop people's capacity to see from all sides. (1928) — Alexander Rodchenko

Only photography has been able to divide human life into a series of moments, each of them has the value of a complete existence. — Eadweard Muybridge

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still. - Dorothea Lange

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still. — Dorothea Lange

The photogram, or camera-less record of forms produced by light, which embodies the unique nature of the photographic process, is the real key to photography. — Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

Photography has always been about documentary, the depiction of the instant, a moment, sometimes a place. Each project is somehow an experimentation of a specific context or a character. — Hedi Slimane

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

Photography helps people to see. — Berenice Abbott

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

Short Art Photography Quotes

  • A photographer is an acrobat treading the high wire of chance, trying to capture shooting stars. — Guy Le Querrec
  • A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed — Richard Avedon
  • Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes a precise moment in time. — Henri Cartier-Bresson
  • Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. — Henri Cartier-Bresson
  • In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality. — Alfred Stieglitz
  • Photography can light-up darkness and expose ignorance. — Lewis Hine
  • Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. — Aaron Siskind
  • Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. — Ambrose Bierce

Top 10 Art Photography Quotes

A window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person. — Saul Leiter

You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved. — Ansel Adams

I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. — Mark Rothko

The desire to discover, the desire to move, to capture the flavor, three concepts that describe the art of photography. — Helmut Newton

Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I'm going to take tomorrow. — Imogen Cunningham

Art can no longer be merely a mirror, it must act as the organizer of the people's consciousness... No form of representation is so readily comprehensible to the masses as photography. — El Lissitzky

The observer must learn to look at the picture as a graphic representation of a mood and not as a representation of objects. — Wassily Kandinsky

Nowadays, with digital printing, it's so easy to make everything perfect, which is not always a good idea. Sometimes the mistakes are really what make a piece. — Cindy Sherman

I can get obsessed by anything if i look at it long enough. That's the curse of being a photographer. — Irving Penn

Art is all about doing what you shouldn't. — Nobuyoshi Araki

Art Photography Image Quotes

Science strives for answers, but art is happy with a good question. - James Turrell quote

Science strives for answers, but art is happy with a good question. — James Turrell

Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest. - Lisette Model quote

Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest. — Lisette Model

Art photography quote You're a work of art. Not everyone will understand you, but the ones who do, will never forget about
You're a work of art. Not everyone will understand you, but the ones who do, will never forget about you.

Work Of Art Photography Quotes

In a sense, every work you do is a self-portrait because your paintings always reveal more about you than about your subject. Your experience of something, not the something itself, is the true underlying subject of every work you do. — Richard Schmid

Anyone can take pictures. What's difficult is thinking about them, organizing them, and trying to use them in some way so that some meaning can be constructed out of them. That's really where the work of the artist begins. — Lewis Baltz

I like photography because it is a reality medium, unlike drawing which is unreal. I like to mess with reality...to bend reality. Some of my works beg the question of is it real or not? — Storm Thorgerson

Art photography quote Photography is about capturing souls, not smiles.
Photography is about capturing souls, not smiles.

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 Allan Poe

The word 'art' is very slippery. It really has no importance in relation to one's work. I work for the pleasure, for the pleasure of the work, and everything else is a matter for the critics. — Manuel Alvarez Bravo

The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown. — Susan Sontag

Art photography quote The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore.
The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore.

I have always felt that a lot of the most interesting work, not just mine but other people's, falls into [the] nether area, somewhere between the worlds of documentary and photojournalism (two very vague words) and the world of art. I think a lot of street photography falls into this nether area. — Alex Webb

My experience says that if you put out a lot of personal work that's good, it tends to attract high dollar commercial work. But to be clear - I don't create art to get high dollar projects, I do high dollar projects so I can create more art. — Chase Jarvis

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

Photography is the art of anticipation, not working with memories, but showing their formation. As such, it has relentlessly usurped imaginative and critical prerogatives of older, slower literature and handmade visual art. — Peter Schjeldahl

Value Of Photography Quotes

As in most markets, there are areas of overvaluation and of undervaluation, with the bulk of shares appearing to hover in the area of fair value relative to their prospects. — Bill Miller

Climate and digitalisation – will bring changes for all, but let there be no doubt: Farming will remain a valued part of our culture and our future. — Ursula von der Leyen

What is of value is that a particular photographer sees the subject differently than I do. A good picture must be a completely individual expression which intrigues the viewer and forces him to think. — Alexey Brodovitch

Art photography quote Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.
Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.

What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm - the relationship between shapes and values. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Photography does deal with 'truth' or a kind of superficial reality better than any of the other arts, but it never questions the nature of reality - it simply reproduces reality. And what good is that when the things of real value in life are invisible? — Duane Michals

In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The 'anything whatever' then becomes the sophisticated acme of value. — Roland Barthes

Art photography quote There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.
There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.

As for the various kinds of montage photography, they are in reality not photography at all but a kind of painting in which photography is used - as pastiches of textiles are used in crazy-quilts - to form a mosaic. Whatever value the montage may have derives from painting rather than the camera. — Lewis Mumford

The term accessories has come to include a host of photographic gadgets of questionable value. — Ansel Adams

This recognition, in real life, of a rhythm of surfaces, lines, and values is for me the essence of photography; composition should be a constant of preoccupation, being a simultaneous coalition - an organic coordination of visual elements. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumes as such, publicly. — Roland Barthes

What Is Photography Quotes

What I like best about underwater photography is giving a visual voice to the invisible. What I like least is the prospect of drowning. — David Doubilet

Often people ask what I'm photographing, which is a hard question to answer. And the best what I've come up with is I just say: Life today. — William Eggleston

Just as typography is human speech translated into what can be read, so photography is the translation of reality into a readable image. — Herbert Bayer

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

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

What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce. — Karl Lagerfeld

To see something spectacular and recognise it as a photographic possibility is not making a very big leap. But to see something ordinary, something you’d see every day, and recognize it as a photographic possibility - that is what I am interested in. — Stephen Shore

Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph. — Matt Hardy

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow. Every job is a self portrait of the person who did it ... Autograph your work with excellence. — Vince Lombardi

I don't have anything to say in any picture. My only interest in photography is to see what something looks like as a photograph. I have no preconceptions. — Garry Winogrand

Simple Photography Quotes

I want to take some quite incredible photographs that have never been taken before... pictures which are simple and complex at the same time, which will amaze and overwhelm people ... I must achieve this so that photography can begin to be considered a form of art. — Alexander Rodchenko

The hardest thing in photography is to create a simple image. — Anne Geddes

I photograph from the heart. I adore little babies and I think that shows. My images are really very positive, very simple, and from the heart. Babies speak a universal language. — Anne Geddes

Eventually I discovered for myself the utterly simple prescription for creativity; be intensely yourself. Don't try to be outstanding; don't try to be a success;don't try to do pictures for others to look at- just please yourself. — Ralph Steiner

To be a photographer, one must photograph. No amount of book learning, no checklist of seminars attended, can substitute for the simple act of making pictures. — Harry Callahan

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

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

The technique of 35mm photography appears simple. One is beguiled by the quick viewing and operation, and by the very questionable inclination to make many pictures with the hope that some will be good. — Ansel Adams

My theory of composition? Simple: do not release the shutter until everything in the viewfinder feels just right. — Ernst Haas

It's often about the simple things, isn't it? Painting and photography are first about seeing, they say. Writing is about observing. Technique is secondary. Sometimes the simple is the most difficult. — Linda Olsson

Photography Quotes

It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera... they are made with the eye, heart and head. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Life is like photography. You need the negatives to develop. - Ziad K. Abdelnour

Life is like photography. You need the negatives to develop. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

I am forever chasing light. Light turns the ordinary into the magical. - Trent Parke

I am forever chasing light. Light turns the ordinary into the magical. — Trent Parke

You only get one sunrise and one sunset a day, and you only get so many days on the planet. A good photographer does the math and doesn't waste either. — Galen Rowell

I like to make people a little uncomfortable. It encourages them to examine who they are and why they think the way they do. — Sally Mann

The biggest cliche in Photography is Sunrise and Sunset. — Catherine Opie

The body says what words cannot. — Martha Graham

Nothing is ever the same twice because everything is always gone forever, and yet each moment has infinite photographic possibilities. — Michael Kenna

I don't have a burning desire to go out and document anything. It just happens when it happens. It's not a conscious effort, nor is it a struggle. Wouldn't do it if it was. The idea of the suffering artist has never appealed to me. Being here is suffering enough. — William Eggleston

If I knew how to take a good photograph, I'd do it every time. - Robert Doisneau

If I knew how to take a good photograph, I'd do it every time. — Robert Doisneau

Camera And Photography Quotes

My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport. — Steve McCurry

The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don't have to explain things with words. — Elliott Erwitt

You have a 45mm automatic pistol on your lap, and I have a 35mm camera on my lap, and my weapon is just as powerful as yours. (To Black Panther militant Eldridge Cleaver) — Gordon Parks

There is 3 key things for good photography: the camera,lighting and... Photoshop — Tyra Banks

For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it! - Ansel Adams

The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it! — Ansel Adams

Photography is a very subtle thing. You must let the camera take you by the hand, as it were, and lead you into your subject. — Margaret Bourke-White

A photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how the camera 'saw' a piece of time and space. — Garry Winogrand

A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they'll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won't do a thing for you if you don't have anything in your head or in your heart. — Arnold Newman

Photography Subject Quotes

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv. — Henri CartierBresson

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. — Margaret Bourke-White

The idea that any photography can't be personal is madness! I see something; it goes through my eye, brain, heart, guts; I choose the subject. What could be more personal than that? — Cornell Capa

Looking and seeing are two different things. What matters is the relationship with the subject. — Christophe Agou

Portraits are the most intimate photographs. The image will survive the subject. — Victor Skrebneski

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

A photograph isn't necessarily a lie, but nor is it the truth. It's more of a fleeting, subjective impression. What I most like about photography is the moment that you can't anticipate: you have to be constantly watching for it, ready to welcome the unexpected. — Martine Franck

Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past. — Berenice Abbott

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

Travel is very subjective. What one person loves, another loathes. — Robin Leach

Photography Love Quotes

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

A photographer went to a socialite party in New York. As he entered the front door, the host said 'I love your pictures - they're wonderful; you must have a fantastic camera.' He said nothing until dinner was finished, then: 'That was a wonderful dinner; you must have a terrific stove. — Sam Haskins

I had a love for photography, which of course rolled into cinematography. - Scoot McNairy

I had a love for photography, which of course rolled into cinematography. — Scoot McNairy

I love the people I photograph. I mean, they're my friends. I've never met most of them or I don't know them at all, yet through my images I live with them. — Bruce Gilden

In the act of love, as in photography, there is a form of life and a kind of slow death. — Nobuyoshi Araki

Reluctant as I am to regard myself as a style icon, I would love to think I could inspire older women to make the most of themselves. — Mary Berry

I think people just see cinematography as being about photography and innovative shots and beautiful lighting. We all want our movies to look great visually, to be beguiling and enticing, but I think that what really defines a great cinematographer is one who loves story. — Seamus McGarvey

Photography is a love affair with life. — Burk Uzzle

I like taking photographs, because I like life. And I like photographing people best of all, because most of all I love humanity. — Horst P. Horst

Only photograph what you love. — Tim Walker

Color Photography Quotes

Color in a picture is like enthusiasm in life. — Vincent Van Gogh

One very important difference between color and monochromatic photography is this: in black and white you suggest; in color you state. Much can be implied by suggestion, but statement demands certainty... absolute certainty. — Paul Outerbridge

When you photograph people in color you photograph their clothes. When you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their soul! — Ted Grant

Seeing the Earth for the first time in orbit, you will be surprised that you never noticed the quality and texture of colors. — Peggy Whitson

Photography has always been associated with death. Reality is colorful, yet early photography always took the color out of reality and made it black-and-white. Color is life; black-and-white is death. There was a ghost hidden in the invention of photography. — Nobuyoshi Araki

In black and white you suggest, in color you state. — Paul Outerbridge

I believe that the essence of photography is black and white. Color is but a deviance. — Sarah Moon

Only in black and white can I see the design and textures. I don't consider color photography art. Black and white is an interpretation. Color is a duplication. — Clyde Butcher

My clothes are great for a honeymoon: They’re light and sexy, colorful and pretty, and not expensive. — Diane Von Furstenberg

Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face. — Edward Steichen

People Writing About Art Photography

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by Alexander Rodchenko

Alexander Rodchenko
quotes on art, life and education

15 812
Read quotes by Helmut Newton

Helmut Newton
quotes on art, photography and life

36 1069
Read quotes by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson
quotes on photography

112 2978
Read quotes by Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams
quotes on photography, nature and black and white photography

147 1976
Read quotes by Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange
quotes on her work

44 476
Read quotes by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
quotes on love, life and leadership

25 363

More Art Photography Quotes

To me, photography is an art of observation. It's about finding something interesting in an ordinary place... I've found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them. — Elliott Erwitt

The pictures are there, and you just take them. — Robert Capa

Never stop looking, no matter where you are, everywhere there are good photographs — Art Wolfe

It's about finding meaning through light. I'm always interested in tensions. A primary one is the collision between the familiar and the strange. — Gregory Crewdson

Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption. — Andre Bazin

We think of photography as pictures. And it is. But I think of photography as ideas. And do the pictures sustain your ideas or are they just good pictures? I want to have an experience in the world that is a deepening experience, that makes me feel alive and awake and conscious. — Joel Meyerowitz

Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies. — Diane Arbus

I always wanted to be a photographer. I was fascinated with the materials, but I never dreamed I would be having this much fun. I imagined something much less elusive, much more mundane. — Lee Friedlander

Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. — Brian Eno

When I first became interested in photography, I thought it was the whole cheese. My idea was to have it recognized as one of the fine arts. Today I don't give a hoot in hell about that. The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself. — Edward Steichen

The creative person is both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder and a lot saner, than the average person. — Frank Barron

It began when I was so ill that there was a good chance of dying. I promised myself that if I survived I would never again pander to a magazine's requests or follow the ideas of art directors. I would only make images which were personal, which arose out of my own life. — Helmut Newton

Technically, I direct, I’m a writer, and I do all these things, but I never went to school for them. It’s just something you pick up; it’s like its own art, basically. — Ryan Higa

It's seldom you make a great picture. you have to milk the cow quite a lot to get plenty of milk to make a little cheese. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Some people`s photography is an art. Mine is not. If they happen to be exhibited in a gallery or a museum, that`s fine. But that`s not why I do them. I`m a gun for hire. — Helmut Newton

I’m interested in using the iconography of nature and the American landscape as surrogates or metaphors for psychological anxiety, fear or desire — Gregory Crewdson

There are no bad pictures; that's just how your face looks sometimes. — Abraham Lincoln

A woman artist could be one of those intuitive geniuses [who] have kept their childlike spirit and have added to it breadth of vision and experience. — Alfred Stieglitz

Anyone interested in design must be interested in other fields of expression - theater, ballet, photography, literature, music. — Lester Beall

The world is filled to suffocating. Man has placed his token on every stone. Every word, every image, is leased and mortgaged. We know that a picture is but a space in which a variety of images, none of them original, blend and clash. — Sherrie Levine

No photographer should be blamed when, instead of capturing reality, he tries to show things he has seen only in his imagination. Photography is the youngest art form. All attempts to enlarge its frontiers are important and should be encouraged. — Philippe Halsman

Art is definitely a passion of mine, but one that I couldn’t afford to keep-up post-graduation, so I turned to DJing to pay the bills. — Hannah Bronfman

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