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
You don't take a photograph, you make it. — Ansel Adams
To take photographs is putting one's head, one's eye, and one's heart on the same axis — Henri Cartier-Bresson
Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second. — Marc Riboud
There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph. — Robert Heinecken
A photographer must be prepared to catch and hold on to those elements which give distinction to the subject or lend it atmosphere. — Bill Brandt
A photographer is an acrobat treading the high wire of chance, trying to capture shooting stars. — Guy Le Querrec
Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still. — Dorothea Lange
A photographer who made a picture from a splendid moment, an accidental pose of someone or a beautiful scenery, is the finder of a treasure. — Robert Doisneau
A good photograph is knowing where to stand. — Ansel Adams
Photography allows you to be a part of the action and document stories. It is a perfect extension of my body. I can take it pretty much anywhere and tell a story with a photograph. — Chris Burkard
If I knew how to take a good photograph, I'd do it every time. — Robert Doisneau
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
Short Photographed Quotes
In the blur of the photograph, time leaves its gleaming, snail-like track. — Wright Morris
A window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person. — Saul Leiter
I am forever chasing light. Light turns the ordinary into the magical. — Trent Parke
Wherever there is light, one can photograph. — Alfred Stieglitz
My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport. — Steve McCurry
If you want to be a photographer, first leave home — Steve McCurry
Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I'm going to take tomorrow. — Imogen Cunningham
The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don't have to explain things with words. — Elliott Erwitt
If it makes you laugh, if it makes you cry, if it rips out your heart, that's a good picture. — Eddie Adams
It's more important for a photographer to have very good shoes, than to have a very good camera — Sebastiao Salgado
Photographed Image Quotes
Rockers are the nicest people to photograph. They have no inhibitions. — David Bailey
My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain. — Helmut Newton
Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest. — Lisette Model
The subject matter is so much more important than the photographer. — Gordon Parks
A photograph is the pause button of life.
Taking Picture Quotes
I’m not good-looking. I used to be, but not anymore. Not like Robert Taylor. What I have got is I have character in my face. It’s taken an awful lot of late nights and drinking to put it there. When I go to work in a picture, I say, ‘Don’t take the lines out of my face. Leave them there.’ — Humphrey Bogart
I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera. I look into the camera and take pictures. My photographs are the tiniest part of what I see that could be photographed. They are fragments of endless possibilities. — Saul Leiter
Yes, photography saved my life. Every time I go through something scary, traumatic, I survive by taking pictures. — Nan Goldin
I can get obsessed by anything if I look at it long enough. That's the curse of being a photographer.
My pictures are about everyday life combined with theatrical effect. I want them to feel outside of time, to take something routine and make it irrational. I’m always looking for a small moment that is a revelation — Gregory Crewdson
In France we have a law which doesn't allow the press to publish a photo that you didn't approve. It lets the paparazzi take the picture, but if they publish this picture, you have the choice to sue the newspaper. So me, I always sued them. — Audrey Tautou
I mean, we've had all these awful pictures from the prison in Iraq and these sort of memos floating around about justifying torture, all this kind of stuff. And it makes you want to take a shower, you know? — Ron Reagan
No matter how sophisticated the camera, the photographer is still the one that makes the picture.
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 pictures are there, and you just take them. — Robert Capa
I still love taking pictures with Polaroid film. For me, it offers the most beautiful way of capturing reality and transferring it onto a flat piece of paper. — Helena Christensen
You don't have to pose your camera. The pictures are there, and you just take them. The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda. (On the Spanish Civil War, 1937) — Robert Capa
Photo Taking Quotes
The next night he asked Jonah if he could take $9.49 out of Jonah's secret stash that only Danny and his mum and Jack knew about. Jonah kept it in his sock drawer next to a photograph of Jonah and a girl with sad eyes, taken in one of those railway station photo booths. — Melina Marchetta
The people on the streets just say 'hi' and let me walk on. They take relatively few photos, and those that do are tourists. Munich natives are relatively relaxed. They pretty much leave me in peace and I think that's very good. The Bavarian mentality fits very well to me. — Manuel Neuer
Photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the photo as a judgment that the photograph is good — Garry Winogrand
I've seen news organizations outright just take photos from Instagram and use it for news without credit, without permission. — Tim Pool
Photography is like making cheese. It takes a hell of a lot of milk to make a small amount of cheese just like it takes a hell of a lot of photos to get a good one. — Robert Gillis
Think about the photo before and after, never during. The secret is to take your time. You mustn't go too fast. The subject must forget about you. Then, however, you must be very quick. — Henri Cartier-Bresson
If you take photos, don't speak, don't write, don't analyze yourself, and don't answer any questions. — Robert Doisneau
One of my challenges was to try to photograph the Great Wall of China. And I did actually take some photos, but it was hard to discern the wall with the naked eye. — Leroy Chiao
Our camera does not produce pretty pictures, but exact duplications that, through our renunciation of photographic effects, turn out to be relatively objective. The photo can optically replace its object to a certain degree. This takes on special meaning if the object cannot be preserved. — Bernd Becher
Gratitude isn't just a feeling, it's an action. Expressing gratitude by writing in a journal, taking a photo, or shooting a video creates a lasting impression that can bring more gratitude into the world-for children and adults. — Janice Kaplan
Taking Pictures Quotes
YouTube is the vlogs and my life, then Instagram is comedy skits and pictures that I take. Twitter's text, and Instagram Stories is even more behind-the-scenes vlog stuff. I'm always posting. — Jake Paul
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
Everyone has a point of view. Some people call it style, but what we're really talking about is the guts of a photograph. When you trust your point of view, that's when you start taking pictures. — Annie Leibovitz
Look, I'm not an intellectual - I just take pictures. — Helmut Newton
Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies. — Diane Arbus
If you're ever if you're ever thinking, “Oh, but I'm a waste of space and I'm a burden,” remember: that also describes the Grand Canyon. Why don't you have friends and family take pictures of you from a safe distance? Revel in your majestic profile? — Maria Bamford
I want a schedule-keeping, waking-up-early, wallet-carrying, picture-hanging man. I don't care if he takes prescription drugs for cholesterol or hair loss. — Sayings
Music is, for me, like a beautiful mosaic which God has put together. He takes all the pieces in his hand, throws them into the world, and we have to recreate the picture from the pieces. — Jean Sibelius
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
The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. — John Huston
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
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
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
Nothing is ever the same twice because everything is always gone forever, and yet each moment has infinite photographic possibilities. — Michael Kenna
Camera And Photography Quotes
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
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
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 camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don't belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation. — Susan Meiselas
Good Photographer Quotes
One of the things my career as an artist might say to young artists is: The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best. And unless you photograph what you love, you are not going to make good art. — Sally Mann
I hate good taste. It's the worst thing that can happen to a creative person. — Helmut Newton
It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary. — David Bailey
A good photograph is like a good hound dog, dumb, but eloquent. — Eugene Atget
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
Never stop looking, no matter where you are, everywhere there are good photographs — Art Wolfe
You have to do stuff that average people don't understand because those are the only good things. — Andy Warhol
What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce. — Karl Lagerfeld
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
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
Photography And Travel Quotes
NOT I - NOT ANYONE else, can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself. — Walt Whitman
Being a working mom and traveling as well with a baby, my goodness it’s a lot, but it’s all so exciting. — Meghan Markle
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
Travel is very subjective. What one person loves, another loathes. — Robin Leach
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
I am a traveler. I am a nomad. I rarely sleep in the same bed more than three or four nights. And I know hotel life better than anyone. — Diane Von Furstenberg
There is one voyage, the first, the last, the only one. — Thomas Wolfe
I enjoy traveling and recording far-away places and people with my camera. But I also find it wonderfully rewarding to see what I can discover outside my own window. You only need to study the scene with the eyes of a photographer. — Alfred Eisenstaedt
To many people holidays are not voyages of discovery, but a ritual of reassurance. — Phillip Adams
Voyage, travel, and change of place impart vigor — Seneca
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 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 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
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
Documentary Photography Quotes
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 think photojournalism is documentary photography with a purpose. — W. Eugene Smith
Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. — Henri Cartier-Bresson
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
Documentary: That’s a sophisticated and misleading word. And not really clear… The term should be documentary style… You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless. — Walker Evans
A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph. — Dorothea Lange
What I believe is really good in the so-called documentary approach to photography is the addition of lyricism.[this quality] is usually produced unconsciously and even unintentionally and accidentally by the cameraman. — Walker Evans
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
To me documentary photography means making a picture so that the viewer doesn’t think about the man who made the picture. At its esthetic core is very old tradition in art: naturalism. And its purpose is to document all facets of social relationships. — Aaron Siskind
Documentary photography has amassed mountains of evidence. And yet... the genre has simultaneously contributed much to spectacle, to retinal excitation, to voyeurism, to terror, envy and nostalgia, and only a little to the critical understanding of the social world. — Allan Sekula
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
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 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
There are two dirty words in photography, one is art, the other is good taste — Helmut Newton
Science strives for answers, but art is happy with a good question. — James Turrell
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
Street Photography Quotes
Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn't look like somebody else's work. — William Klein
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
Since I'm inarticulate, I express myself with images. — Helen Levitt
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
Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. — Henri Cartier-Bresson
I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed. — Garry Winogrand
The eye should learn to listen before it looks. — Robert Frank
If you can smell the street by looking at the photo, it's a street photograph — Bruce Gilden
Digital Photography Quotes
Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption. — Andre Bazin
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
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
I don't like explosions. I don't mind progress. But digital photography has made every man, woman, child and chimpanzee a photographer of sorts and consequently has numbed down the general quality of photographs. — Elliott Erwitt
I think that digital is offering many great possibilities for cinematographers. Particularly in urban cityscapes and low light photography its allowing us to render what we actually see with our eyes; which is interesting. — Seamus McGarvey
For the birth of something new, there has to be a happening. Newton saw an apple fall; James Watt watched a kettle boil; Roentgen fogged some photographic plates. And these people knew enough to translate ordinary happenings into something new. — Alexander Fleming
It became the middle finger I couldn’t raise in PR photographs. The mustache became my silent last word in the verbal battles I was losing with higher headquarters on rules, targets, and fighting the war. — Robin Olds
I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost. — Nan Goldin
I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls. They always say because it's such a beautiful animal. There you go. I think my mother is attractive, but I have photographs of her. — Ellen DeGeneres
I think Bigfoot is blurry, that's the problem. It's not the photographer's fault. Bigfoot is blurry, and that's extra scary to me. There's a large, out-of-focus monster roaming the countryside. Run, he's fuzzy, get out of here. — Mitch Hedberg
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 photographers are responsible for creating or reflecting an image of women in society, then I must say, there is only one way for the future, and this is to define women as strong and independent. This should be the responsibility of photographers today: to free women, and finally everyone, from the terror of youth and perfection. — Peter Lindbergh
You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life. — Joan Miro
If I give someone a horsetail he will have no difficulty making a photographic enlargement of it - anyone can do that. But to observe it, to notice and discover its forms, is something that only a few are capable of. — Karl Blossfeldt
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
I always thought if I photographed anyone or anything enough, I would never lose the person, I would never lose the memory, I would never lose the place. But the pictures show me how much I've lost. — Nan Goldin
A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you. — Brigitte Bardot
In Conclusion
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