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 Taking Photograph Quotes
I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed. — Garry Winogrand
Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. — Aaron Siskind
The pictures are there, and you just take them. — Robert Capa
A good snapshot stops a moment from running away. — Eudora Welty
The camera can photograph thought. — Dirk Bogarde
A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed — Richard Avedon
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
Photograph the world as it is. Nothing's more interesting than reality. — Mary Ellen Mark
Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera. — Yousuf Karsh
Top 10 Taking Photograph Quotes
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
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
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
Photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the photo as a judgment that the photograph is good — Garry Winogrand
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
I just think it's important to be direct and honest with people about why you're photographing them and what you're doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul. — Mary Ellen Mark
If you take photos, don't speak, don't write, don't analyze yourself, and don't answer any questions. — Robert Doisneau
Taking Photograph Image Quotes
Sometimes the smallest step in the right direction ends up being the biggest step of your life. Tip top if you must, but take the step.
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
Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass away.
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
Take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic.
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 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
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
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
I've seen news organizations outright just take photos from Instagram and use it for news without credit, without permission. — Tim Pool
Live your life. Take chances. Be crazy. Don't wait. Because right now is the oldest you've ever been and the youngest you'll ever be again.
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
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
Accept both compliments and criticism. It takes both sun and rain for a flower to grow.
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
I always took pictures, but about five or six years ago, I started taking more behind the scenes at SNL, and now I have some 60,000 photos sitting on my laptop. — Jason Sudeikis
A photograph is neither taken or seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos. — Henri Cartier-Bresson
When you take a photo at 1/1000 of a second, the moment can become an eternal fact, an eternal moment. So we have a philosophical problem of objectivity and subjectivity. — Eikoh Hosoe
Taking Pictures Quotes
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
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
Ho who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.
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
Givers have to set limits because takers rarely do.
Mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures of images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action. — Peter Senge
I'm known for taking pictures very close, and the older I get, the closer I get. — Bruce Gilden
Saying a camera takes nice pictures is like saying a guitar plays nice melodies. — Darren Rowse
Very effective way to do this with a bunch of second graders, is take a picture of The Lion King for instance, and a teacher might say, 'Do you know that the music for this movie was written by a gay man?' The message is: I'm better at what I do, because I'm gay. — Michele Bachmann
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
Camera And Photography Quotes
My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport. — Steve McCurry
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
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
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
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
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
I must admit that I am not a member of the ugly school. I have a great regard for certain notions of beauty even though to some it is an old fashioned idea. Some photographers think that by taking pictures of human misery, they are addressing a serious problem. I do not think that misery is more profound than happiness. — Saul Leiter
I have always avoided photographing in the studio. A woman does not spend her life sitting or standing in front of a seamless white paper background. Although it makes my life more complicated, I prefer to take my camera out into the street... and places that are out of bounds for photographers have always had a special attraction for me. — Helmut Newton
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
If it doesn’t have ambiguity, don’t bother to take it. I love that, that aspect of photography - the mendacity of photography. It’s got to have some kind of peculiarity in it, or it’s not interesting to me. — Sally Mann
Taking photographs is generally an act of 'looking at the object, whereas 'being seen' or 'showing' is what is most interest to one who does a self-portrait...self-portraits deny not only photography itself but the 20th century as an era as well...an inevitable phenomenon at the end of the 20th century. — Yasumasa Morimura
I think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody's face in a photograph. The magic is in seeing people in new ways. — Duane Michals
I try to photograph people's spirits and thoughts. As to the soul-taking by the photographer, I don't feel I take away, but rather that the sitter and I give to each other. It becomes an act of mutual participation. — Yousuf Karsh
I'm exchanging molecules every 30 days with the natural world and in a spiritual sense I know I am a part of it and take my photographs from that emotional feeling within me, rather than from an emotional distance as a spectator — Galen
One advantage of the discovery of the Photographic Art will be, that it will enable us to introduce into our pictures a multitude of minute details which add to the truth and reality of the representation, but which no artist would take the trouble to faithfully copy from nature. — Henry Fox Talbot
I was an amateur - I am an amateur - and I intend to stay an amateur. To me an amateur photographer is one who is in love with taking pictures, a free soul who can photograph what he likes and who likes what he photographs. — Erwin Blumenfeld
Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it. — Susan Sontag
About shadows: do we see shadows? Loads of people don't. A camera will notice a shadow, but how many people have got a shadow in front of them when they take a picture and don't notice it, and then they see it in the photograph because the photograph will catch the shadow. — David Hockney
Love After Love all your life, whom you have ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life. — Derek Walcott
Some photographers take reality... and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation. — Ansel Adams
My parents offered me my first camera for my birthday and I developed an exclusive passion for it over the years. Since I was not the most social kid on the block, the camera helped me to express myself, invent my own language - something like a secret garden. I decided early on I would not write in a diary but take silent photographs instead. — Hedi Slimane
Take pictures all the time. Don't worry if you take a bad photograph; you learn more by taking a bad picture than a good one. If you don't like it, study it and figure out why you don't like it. You'll learn from your mistake. — Patrick Demarchelier
One person can take papers, photograph them without getting excited, return them, and give them away without any scruples; while someone else has to overcome an enormous obstacle. — Markus Wolf
One of the many ways of contesting level-zero, and one of the best, is to take photographs, an activity in which one should start becoming adept very early in life, teach it to children since it requires discipline, aesthetic education, a good eye and steady fingers. — Julio Cortazar
I am a storyteller. I've never been interested in just taking the single image and moving on. I always like to stay with the people I'm photographing for long periods of time. — Larry Clark
The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph. — Walter Benjamin
In Conclusion
Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of taking photograph quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about taking photograph to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of taking photograph quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.
