Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment. — Ansel Adams
A landscape clean and crisp in form and colour, rich in inspiration is all that an artist could wish for, begging to be used, and full of inherent possibilities. — Franklin Carmichael
Landscapes, heads and naked women are called artistic photography, while photographs of current events are called press photography. — Alexander Rodchenko
Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel. — Robert Hughes
The biggest cliche in Photography is Sunrise and Sunset. — Catherine Opie
Scenery is fine - but human nature is finer. — John Keats
An image of the earth, its landscapes, directly affects people. The beauty of the earth creates enormous emotion, and through that emotion, you can transmit knowledge and raise consciousness — Yann Arthus-Bertrand
All gardening is landscape painting. — William Kent
A lake is a landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. — Henry David Thoreau
The beauty of the landscape - where sand, water, reeds, birds, buildings, and people all somehow flowed together - has never left me. — Zaha Hadid
Only the human figure exists; landscape is, and should be, no more than an accessory; the painter exclusively of landscape is nothing but a bore. — Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph. — Matt Hardy
A good photograph is knowing where to stand. — Ansel Adams
Never stop looking, no matter where you are, everywhere there are good photographs — Art Wolfe
A landscape, torn by mists and clouds, in which I can see ruins of old churches, as well as of Greek temples - that is Brahms. — Edvard Grieg
Short Landscape Photography Quotes
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
The lake and the mountains have become my landscape, my real world. — Georges Simenon
Photograph the world as it is. Nothing's more interesting than reality. — Mary Ellen Mark
When you can't think of anything else, photograph graffiti, nudes, or plants. — Bill Jay
Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. — Ambrose Bierce
Photography is about capturing souls, not smiles.
Nature Photography Quotes
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
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
A photograph is the pause button of life.
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
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
Life is like photography we develop from the negatives.
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
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 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
Life is like photography, you use the negatives to develop
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
Nothing is ever the same twice because everything is always gone forever, and yet each moment has infinite photographic possibilities. — Michael Kenna
Landscape Painting Quotes
I want people to know what it is they're looking at. But at the same time, the closer they get to the painting, it's like going back into childhood. And it's like an abstract piece.. it becomes the landscape of the brush marks rather than just sort of an intellectual landscape. — Jenny Saville
Franz Kline, who became known for his black and white paintings, did a whole series of gorgeous landscapes and wonderful portraits that may still hang in Greenwich Village. — David Amram
REALISM, n. The art of depicting nature as it is seem by toads. The charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a measuring-worm. — Ambrose Bierce
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
The vivacity and brightness of colors in a landscape will never bear any comparison with a landscape in nature when it is illumined by the sun, unless the painting is placed in such a position that it will receive the same light from the sun as does the landscape. — Leonardo da Vinci
I find the Romantic period extraordinarily interesting. My landscapes have connections with Romanticism: at times I feel a real desire for, an attraction to, this period, and some of my pictures are a homage to Caspar David Friedrich. — Gerhard Richter
Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments? — John Constable
I can get obsessed by anything if I look at it long enough. That's the curse of being a photographer.
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
Overall, the anarchy was the most creative of all periods of Japanese culture for in it there appeared the greatest landscape painting, the culmination of the skill of landscape gardening and the arts of flower arrangement, and the No drama. — J. M. Roberts
A painted landscape is always more beautiful than a real one, because there's more there. Everything is more sensual, and one takes refuge in its beauty. — Fernando Botero
Overall, the anarchy was the most creative of all periods of Japanese culture for in it there appeared the greatest landscape painting, the culmination of the skill of landscape gardening and the arts of flower arrangement, and the No drama. — John Roberts
Beautiful Landscape Quotes
The good building is not one that hurts the landscape, but one which makes the landscape more beautiful than it was before the building was built. — Frank Lloyd Wright
God never made an ugly landscape. All that sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild. — John Muir
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
The real voyage of discovery consists not seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
In Iceland, you can see the contours of the mountains wherever you go, and the swell of the hills, and always beyond that the horizon. And theres this strange thing: youre never sort of hidden; you always feel exposed in that landscape. But it makes it very beautiful as well. — Hannah Kent
I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast. — Edith Wharton
Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves. — Derek Walcott
No matter how sophisticated the camera, the photographer is still the one that makes the picture.
What concerns me when I work, is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it's pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is - did I make a beautiful picture? — Helen Frankenthaler
I was always amazed at how beautiful the light was. At different times of the day the landscape becomes a different place. Dawn and dusk, it's a different place. — Bill Henson
I do not wonder at a snowflake, a shell, a summer landscape, or the glory of the stars; but at the necessity of beauty under which the universe lies. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sculpture is an art of the open air... I would rather have a piece of my sculpture put in a landscape, almost any landscape, than in, or on, the most beautiful building I know. — Henry Moore
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
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
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
Nature Landscape Quotes
The landscape affects the human psyche - the soul, the body and the innermost contemplations - like music. Every time you feel nature deeper you resonate better with her, finding new elements of balance and freedom. — Nikos Kazantzakis
For me nature is not landscape, but the dynamism of visual forces, an event rather than an appearance. These forces can only be tackled by treating color and form as ultimate identities, freeing them from all descriptive or functional roles. — Bridget Riley
There is nothing like walking to get the feel of a country. A fine landscape is like a piece of music; it must be taken at the right tempo. Even a bicycle goes too fast — Paul Scott Mowrer
For me a work of art must be an elevated interpretation of nature. The search for the ideal has been the purpose of my life. In landscape or seascape, I love above all the poetic motif. — William-Adolphe Bouguereau
I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Congress has an obligation to protect our country's natural beauty, embodied in our nation's parks, rivers, and breathtaking landscapes. — Dave Reichert
I have always been very interested in landscape... I find that all natural forms are a source of unending interest - tree trunks, the growth of branches from the trunk, each finding its own individual air-space. — Henry Moore
If you give a child something very complex to paint, such as a bouquet of flowers or a natural landscape, if he is very good, eventually he will get back - like Cezanne - to the essential forms of what he sees. — Robert Motherwell
The most beautiful landscape cannot hold my fascinated attention as much as nature by the seaside and all that is connected with water. — Lyonel Feininger
Admittedly, we must move ahead with the development of our land resources. Likewise, our technology must be refined. But in the long run life will succeed only in a life-giving environment, and we can no longer afford unnecessary sacrifices of living space and natural landscape to 'progress.' — Stewart Udall
Beautiful Photography Quotes
The human body is first and foremost a mirror to the soul and its greatest beauty comes from that. — Auguste Rodin
The beautiful part of the cloud is, you know, it’s unlimited capacity, in theory. — Eric Yuan
The world is full of beauty, you are the greatest proof of this. — Matshona Dhliwayo
If you are out there shooting, things will happen for you. If you're not out there, you'll only hear about it. — Jay Maisel
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
The beauty of women was the first expression of my photography. — Alberto Korda
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
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
I have a deep respect and love for these tiny humans, and I hope to convey in my images a measure of the beauty that exists in all children. — Anne Geddes
What is important is that our optical awareness rids itself of classical notions of beauty and opens itself more and more to the beauty of the instant and of these surprising points of view that appear for a brief moment and never return; those are what make photography an art. — Raoul Hausmann
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
Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. — Aaron Siskind
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
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 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
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
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
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 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
Photography is a love affair with life. — Burk Uzzle
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
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
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
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
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
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
Notebook. No photographer should be without one! — Ansel Adams
Beauty can be seen in all things. — Matt Hardy
Men have dominated the field of landscape photography just as they have dominated the land itself. Thus shooting a virgin landscape has been man's work - hunting, not gardening. — Lucy R. Lippard
You don't make a photograph just with a camera — Ansel Adams
To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces. — Ansel Adams
A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels... — Ansel Adams
I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style. — Ken Burns
All aspects of photography interest me and I feel for the female body the same curiosity and the same love as for a landscape, a face or anything else which interests me. In any case, the nude is a form of landscape. There are no reasons for my photographs, nor any rules; all depends on the mood of the moment, on the mood of the model. — Jeanloup Sieff
There's nothing worse than a brilliant beginning. — Pablo Picasso
I think landscape photography in general is somewhat undervalued. — Galen Rowell
This is the gift of the landscape photograph, that the heart finds a place to stand. — Emmet Gowin
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. — Paul Caponigro
Everybody now has a camera, whether it is a professional instrument or just part of a phone. Landscape photography is a pastime enjoyed by more and more. Getting it right is not an issue. It is difficult to make a mistake with the sophisticated technology we now have. Making a personal and creative image is a far greater challenge. — Michael Kenna
By trying many different approaches, you may slowly reach the point where you say more about yourself than about the objects or the landscapes or the people you photograph - and this is where photography really interests me. — Frank Horvat
It would be beautiful to photograph the winners of everything from Nobel to booby prize, clutching trophy, or money or certificate, solemn or smiling or tear stained or bloody, on the precarious pinnacle of the human landscape. — Diane Arbus
I can go into the wilderness and not see anyone for days and experience a kind of space that hasn't changed for tens of thousands of years. Having that experience was necessary to my perception of how photography can look at the changes humanity has brought about in the landscape. My work does become a kind of lament. — Edward Burtynsky
I had a Vincent van Gogh, a small Provençal landscape. We sold it. If you're going to have a van Gogh it should be a really good van Gogh. — Pierre Berge
For me, going back to itinerant landscape painting, it's not about returning to an older method, but about building on what happened in the 20th century in photography. And also highlighting what the differences are between a painting and a photograph in picturing space. — Cynthia Daignault
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
There's something arbitrary about taking a picture. So I can stand at the edge of a highway and take one step forward and it can be a natural landscape untouched by man and I can take one step back and include a guardrail and change the meaning of the picture radically... I can take a picture of a person at one moment and make them look contemplative and photograph them two seconds later and make them look frivolous. — Stephen Shore
It seems so utterly naive that landscape - not that of the pictorial school - is not considered of "social significance" when it has a far more important bearing on the human race of a given locale than excrescences called cities. — Edward Weston
Images of people, cities, and landscapes from the air tell a unique story about our personal space and how we relate to one another. I've always aimed to address the bigger picture and later trends. In many ways, what a photographer does is give others a chance to step back and look at their world and gain perspective on where we stand, and what that means. — Vincent Laforet
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
We rely, I think, on landscape photography to make intelligible to us what we already know. — Robert Adams
Landscape pictures can offer us, I think, three verities: geography, autobiography, and metaphor. Geography is, if taken alone, sometimes boring, autobiography is frequently trivial, and metaphor can be dubious. But taken together, as in the best work of people like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, the three kinds of information strengthen each other and reinforce what we all work to keep intact - the affection for life. — Robert Adams
There is always a subjective aspect in landscape art, something in the picture that tells us as much about who is behind the camera as about what is in front of it. — Robert Adams
A landscape image cuts across all political and national boundaries, it transcends the constraints of language and culture. — Charlie Waite
In Conclusion
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