Color in a picture is like enthusiasm in life. — Vincent Van Gogh
When you photograph people in color you photograph their clothes. When you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their soul! — Ted Grant
I believe that the essence of photography is black and white. Color is but a deviance. — Sarah Moon
Color is descriptive. Black and white is interpretive. — Elliott Erwitt
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
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
Photography has every right and every merit to claim our attention as the art of our age. — Alexander Rodchenko
Photography freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits. — Pierre-Auguste Renoir
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
Photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world. — Bruno Barbey
Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs. — Ansel Adams
In black and white you suggest, in color you state. — Paul Outerbridge
Sunlight is painting. — Nathaniel Hawthorne
Color Photography Image Quotes
Photography is about capturing souls, not smiles.
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
A window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person. — Saul Leiter
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
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
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
To teach is to color a life forever.
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
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
Art Photography Quotes
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
I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - thing I had no words for.
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
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
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
You see a person's true colors when you are no longer beneficial to their life.
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
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
The pictures are there, and you just take them. — Robert Capa
Digital Photography Quotes
For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity. — Henri Cartier-Bresson
A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective. — Irving Penn
Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption. — Andre Bazin
A photograph is the pause button of life.
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
In the digital world of today, one can say almost nothing is local. — John W. Henry
The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. — Richard Avedon
If someone shows you their true colors, don't try to repaint them
As an avid photographer, I also took advantage of the latest technology in photography - digital photography - to post photos on my website on a daily basis. — Tipper Gore
... while in theory digital technology entails the flawless replication of data, its actual use in contemporary society is characterized by the loss of data, degradation, and noise; the noise which is even stronger than that of traditional photography. — Lev Manovich
Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information. — Man Ray
I don't think that digital photography is romantic yet. It's not sympathetic the way that film is. — Matthew Modine
Camera And Photography Quotes
If I knew how to take a good photograph, I'd do it every time. — Robert Doisneau
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
I often think that the night is more alive and richly colored than the day.
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
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
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 And Light 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
Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second. — Marc Riboud
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 can light-up darkness and expose ignorance. — Lewis Hine
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
To me if there's an achievement to lighting and photography in a film it's because nothing stands out, it all works as a piece. And you feel that these actors are in this situation and the audience is not thrown by a pretty picture or by bad lighting. — Roger Deakins
Colors fade, temples crumble, empires fall, but wise words endure.
If you want something to look interesting, don’t light all of it. — John Loengard
Now, to consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravity before going for a walk. — Edward Weston
Photography is thus brought within reach of every human being who desires to preserve a record of what he sees… and enables the fortunate possessor to go back by the light of his own fireside to scenes which would otherwise fade from memory and be lost. — George Eastman
I travel light. I think the most important thing is to be in a good mood and enjoy life, wherever you are. — Diane Von Furstenberg
Nature Photography Quotes
When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping and the mask falls so that the real person appears. — Philippe Halsman
The purpose of all my photos is to capture the power of nature and convey it in a way that inspires someone to feel passionate and connected to the image. — Peter Lik
I may be wrong, but the essential illustrative nature of most documentary photography, and the worship of the object per se, in our best nature photography, is not enough to satisfy the man of today, compounded as he is of Christ, Freud, and Marx. — Aaron Siskind
Life is like photography we develop from the negatives.
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
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 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
I do not object to retouching, dodging or accentuation as long as they do not interfere with the natural qualities of photographic technique. — Alfred Stieglitz
I find it some of the hardest photography and the most challenging photography I've ever done. It's a real challenge to work with the natural features and the natural light. — Galen Rowell
Photography is not only drawing with light, though light is the indispensable agent of its being. It is modeling or sculpturing with light, to reproduce the plastic form of natural objects. It is painting with light. — Berenice Abbott
I like small things, I like small moments that are almost elliptical, that are not necessarily linear; they're natural things that happen in the world, but if you look at them from a slight angle there's more than meets the eye. — Keith Carter
Landscape Photography Quotes
My pictures must first be beautiful, but that beauty is not enough. I strive to convey an underlying edge of anxiety, of isolation, of fear. — Gregory Crewdson
Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment. — Ansel Adams
Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph. — Matt Hardy
Ever since the 1860s when photographers travelled the American West and brought photographs of scenic wonders back to the people on the East Coast of America we have had a North American tradition of landscape photography used for the environment. — Galen Rowell
I think photography has made us see the landscape in a very dull way - that's one of its effects. It's not spatial. — David Hockney
I am sure the next step will be the electronic image, and I hope I shall live to see it. I trust that the creative eye will continue to function, whatever technological innovations may develop. — Ansel Adams
Landscapes, heads and naked women are called artistic photography, while photographs of current events are called press photography. — Alexander Rodchenko
I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photography—that it is purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in the with the history of painting and other art forms. — Joel Meyerowitz
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
Parks and gardens are the quintessential intimate landscapes. People use them all the time, leaving their energy and memories behind. It's what's left behind that I like to photograph. — Michael Kenna
Photography Subject Quotes
In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv. — Henri CartierBresson
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
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
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 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
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
History Of Photography Quotes
The players are writing a beautiful page of the club’s history and also of French football history. — Didier Deschamps
Fossils work almost the same way as photography as a record of history. The accumulation of time and history becomes a negative of the image. And this negative comes off, and the fossil is the positive side. This is the same as the action of photography. — Hiroshi Sugimoto
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
Like an organism, photography was born whole. It is in our progressive discovery of it that its history lies. — John Szarkowski
I really learned a lot from collecting clothes because I got to go back into the history of fashion and fashion photography and jewelry. It changed how I felt about fashion and about what I did forever because I used to look a little bit down on myself for it. — Stephanie Seymour
I adore [photography's] uneasy mix of fact and fiction - its dubious claim to truth - its status as history. — Eleanor Antin
The history of photography needs clearing out. It needs something else now. Because photography always acknowledged there were cameras before photography. — David Hockney
Is it possible to put an end to a form of human behavior which has existed throughout history by means of photography? — James Nachtwey
I think this is the most exciting time in the history of photography. Technology is expanding what photographers can do, like the microscope and the telescope expanded what scientists could do. — Richard Misrach
I love the history of photography and one process has always replaced another. However, very, very few have disappeared. — Keith Carter
Black And White Photography Quotes
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
Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn't look like somebody else's work. — William Klein
The eye should learn to listen before it looks. — Robert Frank
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
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
Not only does a lens distort forms, but the ordinary plate makes an unholy mess of colour in its tone relations. Yellow becomes black, and blue white. Black sunflowers against a white sky - what a travesty! — Walter J. Phillips
Black-and-white photography, which I was doing in the very early days, was essentially called art photography and usually consisted of landscapes by people like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. But photographs by people like Adams didn't interest me. — William Eggleston
My philosophy, like color television, is all there in black and white. — Graham Chapman
In black and white there are more colors than color photography, because you are not blocked by any colors so you can use your experiences, your knowledge, and your fantasy, to put colors into black and white. — Anders Petersen
What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality. — Ruth Bernhard
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
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
Color is seductive. It changes as it interacts with other colors, it changes because of the light falling upon it, and it changes as it becomes larger in size. — Jay Maisel
White is the color of decomposition. White is also no color. White is nothing. In photography, the paper is white, next comes the light, which is also white, then the shadow is created, the apparition. — Dieter Appelt
I regard photography and film simply as new technical means which painters must absolutely make use of, just as from time out of mind they have made use of brush, charcoal and color. It is certain, however, that photography and film must become as evocative for the sensibility as pencil, charcoal and brush. (1927) — Kazimir Malevich
The first thing I do is take Polaroids of the sitter - 10 or 12 color Polaroids and eight or 10 black-and whites. — Chuck Close
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
In my photography, color and composition are inseparable. I see in color. — William Albert Allard
Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth? - photography, once it begins to reproduce colors, and that won't be long in coming. And yet you want an intelligent man to sweat for months so as to give the illusion he can do something as well as an ingenious little machine can! — Paul Gauguin
Light is the photographic medium par excellence; it is to the photographer what words are to the writer; color and paint to the painter; wood, metal, stone, or clay to the sculptor. — Andreas Feininger
...one sees differently with color photography than black-and-white... in short, visualization must be modified by the specific nature of the equipment and materials being used. — Ansel Adams
To see color as form means looking at the image in a new way, trying to free oneself from absorption in subject matter. — Cole Weston
I can appreciate the idea that with e-books more people would publish, the work would be easier to disseminate, and that it could even be interactive. Being a lover of photography, I especially like the idea that you could include lots of pictures - full-color pictures - with your writing. That to me is exciting! We'll all have to stay tuned to see what develops. — Elaine Equi
Photography could have been invented in color. Colors existed. — Jean-Luc Godard
Beware of color theories. Theories in color photography are dangerous. The plain fact that there are so many of them proves my point. — Ernst Haas
Prose is a photography, poetry is a painting in oil-colors. — Austin O'Malley
The most refined skills of color printing, the intricate techniques of wide-angle photography, provide us pictures of trivia bigger and more real than life. We forget that we see trivia and notice only that the reproduction is so good. Man fulfils his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera — Daniel J. Boorstin
My favorite part about costume designing is the artistry of the job. You meet with a director and a visionary to discuss ideas. You research the characters and figure out the components of their look through your own vision. You create a color palette for a film, television or stage medium and discuss it with the director of photography who then lights your colored subjects. — Ruth E. Carter
Color tends to corrupt photography and absolute color corrupts it absolutely. Consider the way color film usually renders blue sky, green foliage, lipstick red, and the kiddies' playsuit. These are four simple words which must be whispered: color photography is vulgar. — Walker Evans
I thought using three cameras was a lot better than one, because you could see where you were going, where you'd been, and all kinds of things - more like life. I think photography has colored our vision. We're now in an area where it might break something. I think this is a time. I feel it. I don't know whether I'll be here long enough to experience it. I've no plans to leave yet. — David Hockney
I have been using the art of photography to research the ways in which the pictorial strategies of the Nineteenth Century color the way in which the American landscape is apprehended by today's viewers. — John Pfahl
Photography is much more about elimination than inclusion. The images we make with a lens typically eliminate ninety percent of our field of view and everything that is out of our field of view. The shutter slices time, eliminating all moments before and after it opens and closes. Three dimensions are reduced to two. And in some cases color is removed. How can we call these kinds of artifacts unaltered? — John Paul Caponigro
The difficulty with color is to go beyond the fact that it's color ? to have it be not just a colorful picture but really be a picture about something. It's difficult. So often color gets caught up in color, and it becomes merly decorative. Some photographers use it brilliantly to make visual statements combining color and content; otherwise it is empty. — Mary Ellen Mark
I like to use really basic or classic colors, things that people have seen over and over and over again. Primary colors, at least in photography, have been around a lot longer than neon colors and really vibrant purples, hot pinks. Red, blue, yellow, orange - because of Kodachrome and the way that things were produced I think that those colors stood out more than any others. — Alex Prager
Much is missed if we have eyes only for the bright colors. Nature should be viewed without distinction... She makes no choice herself; everything that happens has equal significance. Nothing can be dispensed with. This is a common mistake that many people make: They think that half of nature can be destroyed - the uncomfortable half - while still retaining the acceptable and the pleasing side. — Eliot Porter
Color really doesn't have interaction if it's full of colors. It's the interaction or relationship among or between colors that makes a color image. This usually happens with a few colors, not a glut of them. — Jay Maisel
You need minimum color for maximum effect. — Jay Maisel
We don't experience light, color, and gesture in a vacuum. We experience it in contexts. — Jay Maisel
Some have said that if you take a great picture in color and take away the color, you'll have a great black-and-white picture. But if you're shooting something about color and you take away the color, you'll have nothing. — Jay Maisel
There really isn't anything that you could call 'bad' color. It all has to do with the amount of color you use and in what context it appears. — Jay Maisel
'Color' is quite different from 'colors.' In an image with many colors, we find that all the colors compete with each other rather than interacting with each other. The results" colors. — Jay Maisel
You cannot accurately remember color. — Jay Maisel
In Conclusion
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