In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv. — Henri CartierBresson
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
It's a choice - there are two different sorts of photographer: those obsessed with the technicalities and those obsessed by the subject. — Mario Testino
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
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
The subject matter is so much more important than the photographer. — Gordon Parks
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
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
My photographs are subjective and personal-they’r e intended to be accessible, to relate to people’s lives... People-their well-being and survival-are the crux of what’s important to me. — Roy DeCarava
Anything that excites me for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual. — Edward Weston
For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. — Diane Arbus
When you can't think of anything else, photograph graffiti, nudes, or plants. — Bill Jay
Landscapes, heads and naked women are called artistic photography, while photographs of current events are called press photography. — Alexander Rodchenko
Short Photography Subject Quotes
Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed. — Garry Winogrand
Photography my passion, the search for truth, my obsession. — Alfred Stieglitz
Portraits are the most intimate photographs. The image will survive the subject. — Victor Skrebneski
Photography helps people to see. — Berenice Abbott
Photography is a universal language, transcending the boundaries of race, politics, and nationality. — Arthur Rothstein
Photograph the world as it is. Nothing's more interesting than reality. — Mary Ellen Mark
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
A good photograph is knowing where to stand. — Ansel Adams
Every photograph is a battle of form versus content. — Garry Winogrand
Photography is about capturing souls, not smiles.
Subject In 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
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
What is a portrait good for, unless it shows just how the subject was seen by the painter? In the old days before photography came in a sitter had a perfect right to say to the artist: "Paint me just as I am." Now if he wishes absolute fidelity he can go to the photographer and get it. — Aubrey Beardsley
A photograph is the pause button of life.
Two factors thus emerge as requisites of success in the field of creative photography. First, the subject must be photogenic. Second, its re-creation in a photograph must be based upon technical knowledge, guided and supported by artsitic inspiration. — Andreas Feininger
Does not the very word 'creative' mean to build, to initiate, to give out, to act - rather than to be acted upon, to be subjective? Living photography is positive in its approach, it sings a song of life - not death. — Berenice Abbott
The simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression... In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a leitmotif. — Henri Cartier-Bresson
Life is like photography we develop from the negatives.
The simplicity of photography lies in the fact that it is very easy to make a picture. The staggering complexity of it lies in the fact that a thousand other pictures of the same subject would have been equally easy. — John Szarkowski
While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be. — Susan Sontag
The difference in 'seeing' between the eye and the lens should make it obvious that a photographer who merely points his camera at an appealing subject and expects to get an appealing picture in return, may be headed for a disappointment. — Andreas Feininger
In the absence of a subject with which you are passionately involved, and without the excitement that drives you to grasp it and exhaust it, you may take some beautiful pictures, but not a photographic oeuvre. — Brassai
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
Life is like photography, you use the negatives to develop
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
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.
Art is all about doing what you shouldn't. — Nobuyoshi Araki
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
Photography Details Quotes
I often think of my work as visual haiku. It is an attempt to evoke and suggest through as few elements as possible rather than to describe with tremendous detail. — Michael Kenna
I think when you practice photography or observation, you're on high alert. You polish up your antenna and stick up your head, and you're out there. You're receptive, appreciative of details. It heightens reality. You're trying to step into your alertness. — Debra Granik
The idea of photography as evidence is pure bullshit. A photo is no more proof of any reality than what you may hear being said by someone in a bus. We only record details, small fragments of the world. — Marc Riboud
When a thing ceases to be subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.
In photography, the smallest thing can become a big subject, an insignificant human detail can become a leitmotiv. We see and we make seen as a witness to the world around us; the event, in its natural activity, generates an organic rhythm of forms. — Henri Cartier-Bresson
We have a long history of snapshot photography that appeared to many to be more arbitrary and idiosyncratic than much of the work of professionals. We valued it for what it could tell us about the details of people's daily lives. — Fred Ritchin
The more light you have in an image, the less drama you get. The details start taking over; the mystery is all gone. — Jay Maisel
No matter how sophisticated the camera, the photographer is still the one that makes the picture.
You will, in time, see and show others not just the superficial, but the details, the meanings, and the implications of all that you look at. — Jay Maisel
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
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
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
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
The pictures are there, and you just take them. — Robert Capa
There are two dirty words in photography, one is art, the other is good taste — Helmut Newton
Never stop looking, no matter where you are, everywhere there are good photographs — Art Wolfe
Fashion Photography Quotes
Very often I say to myself: I would like to make a photo where nothing happens. But in order to eliminate, there has to be something to begin with. For nothing to happen, something has to happen first. — Sarah Moon
Put on a sweater and really great sneakers with a big scarf, and you’ll look so stylish. For me, they are an everyday essential. — Meghan Markle
For me, fashion is one of the biggest changes. I never got to wear Chanel or anything like that, growing up, or really experience fashion the way I get to now. — Sadie Sink
Since I was a little girl, I have always been interested in make-up and fashion. — Lisa Manoban
I think that’s what’s so fun about fashion: that I don’t have to be defined by one particular style. It’s whatever I’m feeling that day. — Sadie Sink
I’ve always kind of had this interest in fashion. — Sadie Sink
What I find interesting is working in a society with certain taboos and fashion photography is about that kind of society. To have taboos, then to get around them that is interesting. — Helmut Newton
I love fashion, and I simply enjoy good design in clothes and regard that as one of my hobbies. — Martha C. Nussbaum
I’ve been working seriously in giving fashion a place that it deserves. — Diane Von Furstenberg
I'm not a social person. Not that I'm not at ease. I'm pretty good, but it bores me. Not the people, but the whole thing. What for? It's not very productive. I only want to do what I have to do: fashion, photography, books. And that's all. — Karl Lagerfeld
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
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
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
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
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
Portrait Photography Quotes
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
The tool of every self-portrait is the mirror. You see yourself in it. Turn it the other way, and you see the world . — Agnes Varda
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
As time passes by and you look at portraits, the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit. Photography has something to do with death. It's a trace. — Henri Cartier-Bresson
A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it. — Edward Steichen
It says in the Bible, in plain words, that God made a self-portrait. He created man in His own image - man and woman - for God is Love.Why should we start thinking of a god up in the clouds with wings, if He dwells within us in the spirit of Love?! — Thor Heyerdahl
Photography freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits. — Pierre-Auguste Renoir
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
I loathe my own face, and I've done self-portraits because I've had nobody else to do. — Francis Bacon
A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he's being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks. He's implicated in what's happening, and he has a certain real power over the result. — Richard Avedon
Taking Photograph Quotes
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
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
Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second. — Marc Riboud
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
America is the most inventive country in the world. Why? Because everybody has access to information. In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them. — Tom Clancy
To take photographs means to recognize - simultaneously and within a fraction of a second - both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis. — Henri Cartier-Bresson
To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt. — Susan Sontag
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
Looking and seeing are two different things. What matters is the relationship with the subject. — Christophe Agou
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
In portrait photography there is something more profound that we seek inside a person, while being painfully aware that a limitation of our medium is that the inside is recordable only insofar as it is apparent on the outside...Very often what lies behind the facade is rare and more wonderful than the subject knows or dares to believe. — Irving Penn
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
If it's a likeness, alone, it's not a success. If, through my portraits, you can come to know the subjects more meaningfully, if it synthesizes your feelings toward someone whose work has imprinted itself on your mind--if you see a photograph and say, 'Yes, this is the person,' with a little new insight--that is a beautiful experience. — Yousuf Karsh
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
Photography is very subjective. Photography is not a document on which a report can be made. It is a subjective document. Photography is a false witness, a lie. — Robert Doisneau
The photograph isolates and perpetuates a moment of time: an important and revealing moment, or an unimportant and meaningless one, depending upon the photographer's understanding of his subject and mastery of his process. — Edward Weston
Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. — Susan Sontag
Actually, I'm not all that interested in the subject of photography. Once the picture is in the box, I'm not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren't cooks. — Henri CartierBresson
The purpose of photography is the transmission of a visualized sector of life through the medium of the camera into a mental process that starts with the photographer's thinking about the subject he photographs and is continued in the mind of the spectator. — Roman Vishniac
The first picture of his I ever saw was during a lecture at the Rhyl camera club. I was 16 and the speaker was Emrys Jones. He projected the picture upside down. Deliberately, to disregard the subject matter to reveal the composition. It's a lesson I've never forgotten. — Philip Jones Griffiths
I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else. Excitement about the subject is the voltage which pushes me over the mountain of drudgery necessary to produce the final photograph. — Berenice Abbott
I think the best way to put it is that newspictures are the noun and the verb; our kind of photography is the adjective and adverb. The newspicture is a single frame; ours, a subject viewed in series. The newspicture is dramatic, all subject and action. Ours shows what's back of the action. — Roy Stryker
The portrait is the subject matter in photography where the problems of the media are the most visible. — Thomas Struth
One impulse of photography, as immediate as its impulse to extend the visible, is to theatricalize its subjects. The photographer's command, Watch the birdie! is essentially a stage direction. — Stanley Cavell
In this, photography is the same thing as love. When my gaze, diving into the sea as my subject, converges with the act of photography, hot sparks fly at the point of intersection. — Shomei Tomatsu
Portrait photography never had any charms for me, so I sought my subjects from the house-tops, and finally from the hill-tops and about the surrounding country; the taste strengthening as my successes became greater in proportion to the failures. — William Henry Jackson
"Simply look with perceptive eyes at the world about you, and trust to your own reactions and convictions. Ask yourself: "Does this subject move me to feel, think and dream? Can I visualize a print - my own personal statement of what I feel and want to convey - from the subject before me?"" — Ansel Adams
One teacher told me that my work belonged in the trash. That day I ran out of the classroom and ended up in the library, where there happened to be a black and white photography exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg's photographs of the streets of New York. The subject of his photos were exactly what I was painting about. — Jose Parla
The most important thing... is not clicking the shutter... it is clicking with the subject. — Alfred Eisenstaedt
When I first started to take photographs in Czechoslovakia, I met this old gentleman, this old photographer, who told me a few practical things. One of the things he said was, "Josef, a photographer works on the subject, but the subject works on the photographer." — Josef Koudelka
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
For the artist who practises photography, capturing the image is learning how to sketch on some medium, but is only half the challenge; learning how to print is applying a subjective pallet to that sketch, and completes the creative process. — David Travis
I don't think it's necessary to put your feelings about photography in words. I've read things that photographers have written for exhibitions and so forth about their subjective feelings about photography and mostly I think it's disturbing. I think they're fooling themselves very often. They're just talking, they're not saying anything. — Eliot Porter
If you let some time go by before considering work that you have done, you move toward a more objective position in judging it. The pleasure of the subjective, physical experience in the world is a more distant memory and less influential. — Henry Wessel, Jr.
In Conclusion
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