If you can smell the street by looking at the photo, it's a street photograph — Bruce Gilden
The real truth of life is on the streets. Photograph the daily lives of people, and how they exist, and how they fight for space and time and pleasure. — Don McCullin
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
Photograph the world as it is. Nothing's more interesting than reality. — Mary Ellen Mark
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
Landscapes, heads and naked women are called artistic photography, while photographs of current events are called press photography. — Alexander Rodchenko
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
In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv. — Henri CartierBresson
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 photographer is an acrobat treading the high wire of chance, trying to capture shooting stars. — Guy Le Querrec
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
Photography is a strange phenomenon... You trust your eye and cannot help but bare your soul. — Inge Morath
A good photograph is knowing where to stand. — Ansel Adams
Short Street Photography Quotes
When you can't think of anything else, photograph graffiti, nudes, or plants. — Bill Jay
Photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world. — Bruno Barbey
Photography helps people to see. — Berenice Abbott
Everywhere I look and most of the time I look, I see photographs. — Bert Hardy
Photography is a universal language, transcending the boundaries of race, politics, and nationality. — Arthur Rothstein
A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed — Richard Avedon
Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second. — Marc Riboud
I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed. — Garry Winogrand
Photography is about capturing souls, not smiles.
Street Life Quotes
Youths are passed through schools that don’t teach, then forced to search for jobs that don’t exist and finally left stranded in the street to stare at the glamorous lives advertised around them. — Huey Newton
Before going back to college, i knew i didn't want to be an intellectual, spending my life in books and libraries without knowing what the hell is going on in the streets. Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory. The two have to go together. — Assata Shakur
Life is beautiful. Be thankful for everything. Destroy your ego. Free hugs. Sing your hearts out in the street. Rock ‘n roll. — Ariana Grande
A photograph is the pause button of life.
My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport. — Steve McCurry
Back in the day, music imitated life. Now it's the opposite way around: life is imitating music. It's like whatever the rappers say, people think that that's how we're supposed to be; but back then, we kind of looked at the streets, and we made music for that. — Rakim
In times of grief and sorrow I will hold you and rock you, and take your grief and make it my own. When you cry, I cry, and when you hurt, I hurt. And together we will try to hold back the floods to tears and despair and make it through the potholed street of life. — Nicholas Sparks
Life is like photography we develop from the negatives.
The street is the river of life of the city, the place where we come together, the pathway to the center. — William H. Whyte
I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library. Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified. He said, What? What life? No life of mine. — Grace Paley
I became a larger than life figure for one reason only. When you're quoted in the 'Wall Street Journal,' the 'New York Times,' constantly as the expert in the business people assume you're a lot bigger than you are. And then I had to run like hell to catch up with my own image. — Barbara Corcoran
I have no objection to anyone's sex life as long as they don't practice it in the street and frighten the horses. — Oscar Wilde
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
Failure is a detour, not a dead end street
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
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
Life is like photography, you use the negatives to develop
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 can get obsessed by anything if I look at it long enough. That's the curse of being a photographer.
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
[Documentary photography] is unwittingly literary, because it is nothing other than an observation of contemporary life apprehended at the right moment by an artist capable of seizing it. (1928) — Pierre Mac Orlan
Street Art Quotes
People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish... but that's only if it's done properly. — Banksy
Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they're having a piss. — Banksy
Speak softly, but carry a big can of paint. — Banksy
Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. — Banksy
Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place. Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place. — Banksy
Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I'm going to take tomorrow. — Imogen Cunningham
Manners is he key thing. Say, for instance, when you are growing up, you are walking down the street, you've got to tell everybody "Good morning everybody"! You can't pass one person.
Art must not be concentrated in dead shrines called museums. lt must be spread everywhere – on the streets, in the trams, factories, workshops, and in the workers' homes. — Vladimir Mayakovsky
There are four basic human needs; food, sleep, sex and revenge. — Banksy
You're mind is working at its best when you're being paranoid. You explore every avenue and possibility of your situation at high speed with total clarity. — Banksy
A wall is a very big weapon. It's one of the nastiest things you can hit someone with. — Banksy
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
No matter how sophisticated the camera, the photographer is still the one that makes the picture.
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
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 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
There are two dirty words in photography, one is art, the other is good taste — Helmut Newton
Taking Photograph Quotes
If I knew how to take a good photograph, I'd do it every time. — Robert Doisneau
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
The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don't have to explain things with words. — Elliott Erwitt
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
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
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
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
Portrait Photography Quotes
Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph. — Matt Hardy
Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow. Every job is a self portrait of the person who did it ... Autograph your work with excellence. — Vince Lombardi
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 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
Portraits are the most intimate photographs. The image will survive the subject. — Victor Skrebneski
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
Photography And Travel Quotes
NOT I - NOT ANYONE else, can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself. — Walt Whitman
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
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
Photography Subject Quotes
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
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
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
For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. — Diane Arbus
Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn't look like somebody else's work. — William Klein
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
The eye should learn to listen before it looks. — Robert Frank
Photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the photo as a judgment that the photograph is good — Garry Winogrand
I only know how to approach a place by walking. For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown, or the secret heat of the known awaits just around the corner. — Alex Webb
Rapping just gave me something to do versus the streets. — 21 Savage
When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice. — Robert Frank
All the technique in the world doesn't compensate for the inability to notice. — Elliott Erwitt
Nothing happens when you sit at home. I always make it a point to carry a camera with me at all times...I just shoot at what interests me at that moment. — Elliott Erwitt
Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location. — Joe McNally
Polaroid, you know, goes against everything that photography is now. You can't make multiples. Only one exists. I love that. By the way, while we've been talking I've now seen a total of three people I know walking on 8th street. — Laurel Nakadate
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
Seeing is not enough; you have to feel what you photograph — Andre Kertesz
If I saw something in my viewfinder that looked familiar to me, I would do something to shake it up. — Garry Winogrand
Photography is like life What does it all mean? I don't know - but you get an impression, a feeling. An impression of walking through the street, walking through the park, walking through life. I'm very suspicious of people who say they know what it means. — Leonard Freed
I like to think I keep my mind open. When I walk the streets I don't look for anything in particular. I come from a philosophy that believes you shouldn't have preconceived notions - that you don't need a gimmick. That you should just photograph what you react to - what you see. — Elliott Erwitt
Photography intervenes in a very strange way. It makes the streets, gates, squares of the city into illustrations of a trashy novel, draws off the banal obviousness of this ancient architecture to inject it with the most pristine intensity. — Louis Aragon
You don't make a photograph just with a camera — Ansel Adams
I have problems with a lot of photography, particularly street photography and photojournalism - objectifying the other, finding the contempt and exoticism that you might feel within yourself or toward yourself and projecting it out to others. There can be an abusive power to photography, too. — Barbara Kruger
It's neither our culture nor our race which
interconnects us. It's Street Photography. — Thomas Leuthard
Street Photography is like fishing. Catching the fish is more exciting than eating it. — Thomas Leuthard
I suspect it is for one's self-interest that one looks at one's surroundings and one's self. This search is personally born and is indeed my reason and motive for making photographs. — Lee Friedlander
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
Street photography is art and if art is a crime, please God, forgive me. — Thomas Leuthard
Before the first press pictures, the ordinary man would visualize only those events that took place near him, on his street or in his village. Photography opened a window. As the reader's outlook expanded, the world began to shrink. — Gisele Freund
I admire photographers that don't need a destination. In some ways, street photography is like that. There's a quality of wanderlust for sure in my work, but I need a destination. — Alec Soth
After the war, photography came alive, in part because everybody started to use the 35mm camera, and worked on the street instead of in a studio, and that made an enormous difference in not only how photographs looked, but what they were about. — Robert Benton
The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process - a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made - constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes - but photographs, as the man on the street put, were taken. — John Szarkowski
Mostly the subject of the photograph, which can be anyone really, coming down the street - someone that has no idea. "Heroism" in photography, just like in a novel, is for everyone. — Hedi Slimane
The only thing which completely was an amazement to me and brought me to photography was the work of Munkacsi. When I saw the photograph of Munkacsi of the black kids running in a wave, I couldn't believe such a thing could be caught with the camera. I said, 'Damn it', I took my camera and went out into the street. — Henri Cartier-Bresson
Photography is essentially an act of recognition by street photographers, not an act of invention. Photographers might respond to an old man’s face, or an Arbus freak, or the way light hits a building—and then they move on. Whereas in all the other art forms, take William Blake, everything that came to that paper never existed before. It’s the idea of alchemy, of making something from nothing. — Duane Michals
In Conclusion
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