Being A Photographer Quotes & Sayings

I'm not a nice girl; I'm a photographer. (On being told by a Federal Art Project official, after she photographed the Bowery, that a nice girl should not go into such neighborhoods ) — Berenice Abbott

Modern Art is being used to index me. Surely it was a source but photographers have influenced Modern Art quite as deeply as they have been influenced, maybe more. Anyway painters don't have a copyright on M. A. We were all born in the same upheaval. — Edward Weston

I am always on the go; being a photographer, filmmaker, author and a father, things become stressful, and it is important to find time to escape for a few minutes. — Nigel Barker

Everybody can take a good picture. Everybody is interesting. Everyone has an interesting face. Some people are more difficult or more nervous or more tired. When you do a movie, you have action, you're talking, you're moving. You don't see the camera. Taking a picture with a photographer, you don't talk, it's more difficult than in a movie for your body to relax, to be yourself. — Keira Knightley

I liked the idea of being a photographer, just that you take this one picture of this one thing that'll never happen again - it's a bit weird when you think about it. — Courtney Barnett

Maybe I could help with some of the wedding stuff, too."

Sidney laughed, then saw Vaughn frown. " Wait - you're being serious?"

He shrugged. "Sure, why not?"

"No offense, but you don't exactly exude a 'wedding planning' vibe."

"And thank God for that. But I think I can manage a few tasks. How hard could it be to pick a photographer? Or a band? Just ask them if they plan to play 'Y.M.C.A.' or that annoying Kool and the Gang song. If they say no, they're hired. — Julie James

I never considered myself a good photographer. I still don't. I thought of myself as a hard worker. My camera was a sponge and I had an instinct that athletes have - anticipation. Photography really represents an enormous amount of anticipation - understanding what might be there the next moment and being prepared for it. — Lawrence Schiller

I try not to tell students where to shoot, when to shoot, or what to shoot. I feel finding the picture is the most important part of being a photographer. The actual shooting is of lesser importance. — Jay Maisel

I'm an amateur photographer, apart from being a professional one, and I think maybe my amateur pictures are the better ones. — Elliott Erwitt

Photography is like stealing.You rob someone of a moment that exposes something essential about their character,their soul if you like.there are people who are very conscious of that,who find that terrifying.The thought that everyone,friend of foe,can get so close to you,look you straight in the eye and judge you without having any control over it or being able to respond.A part of them has become the property of the photographer. — Esther Verhoef

Composition is what's similar between being photographer and director. As a photographer, you're sort of doing everything - you're directing the lights and you're framing and you're moving around. The hardest thing to learn as a director is how cameras have to move. You have to have patience, you have to learn how to look through the lens and then you have to learn to combine all of the compartments into one great image. — Russell James

I wasn't really that good at being a musician. And then I tried being a standup. I was an actor. I was a photographer. I tried everything. Nothing was particularly working for me, but then, as a musician, I wrote jokes for comics. And they started to buy my jokes, and that's where I thought maybe that might work — Garry Marshall

A photograph records both the thing in front of the camera and the conditions of its making ... A photograph is also a document of the state of mind of the photographer. And if you were to extend the idea of the set-up photograph beyond just physically setting up the picture, I would argue that the photographer wills the picture into being. — James Welling

I fell in love with traveling and thought being a photographer would be an interesting way to travel and make a living. — Peter Menzel

Art depends on there being affection in its creator's life and an artist must find ways, like everyone else, to nourish it. A photographer down on his or her knees picturing a dog has found pleasure enough to make many things possible. — Robert Adams

I fell in love with the darkroom, and that was part of being a photographer at the time. The darkroom was unbelievably sexy. I would spend all night in the darkroom. — Annie Leibovitz

Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation. A photograph is a result of the photographer's decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless. — John Berger

You know, my dad wasn't a photographer or filmmaker by profession, but on Sundays, he would take pictures of me and my family or his pals horseback riding, and it was a means of communication and affection, a means of not being so dysfunctional with each other. — Bruce Weber

My father had wanted to be a commercial artist. He got as far as being a photographer in the army in World War II, but he was always a Sunday painter. At a certain point, he gave me his oil paints and I messed around with them, having no idea what I was doing. — David Salle

After that, a strange thing happened: Amy couldn't stop her expectations from rising. She imagined herself transformed and beautiful, like Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink, with her homemade dress and mysterious lace boots. She pictured her hair in an upsweep of loose curls. In the fantasy, her prom face looked like the one she only wore asleep, loose and relaxed. She imagined a photographer asking her to smile and, for the first time in her life, being able to do it. — Cammie McGovern

I think that the photographer must completely control his picture and bring to it all his personality, and in this area most photographs never transcend being just snapshots. When a great photographer does infuse the snapshot with his personality and vision, it can be transformed into something truly moving and beautiful. — Duane Michals

There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa
and as many books about it as you could read in a leisurely lifetime. Whoever writes a new one can afford a certain complacency in the knowledge that his is a new picture agreeing with no one else's, but likely to be haugthily disagreed with by all those who believed in some other Africa ... Being thus all things to all authors, it follows, I suppose, that Africa must be all things to all readers.
Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer's paradise, a hunter's Valhalla, an escapist's Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just 'home. — Beryl Markham

I'm not a serious photographer like many of my contemporaries. That is to say, I am serious about not being serious. — Elliott Erwitt

Trauma and pain are the foundations of art. I believe that. When tragedy strikes, however, a muralist or a watercolorist has the opportunity to be a human being in the moment and an artist afterward. Faced with the death of a loved one, a sculptor or portraitist can first grieve, suffer, and heal--then create. Most artists go through life this way. They can react normally to the trials and tribulations of the human experience. They can pass through the world with compassion and comradeship. They can make their art later. Outside, elsewhere, beyond. But photography is immediate. It does not offer the luxury of time. Faced with blood, death, or transformation, a photographer has no choice but to reach for the camera. An artist first, a human being afterward. Photography is a neutral record of all events, a chronicle of things both sublime and terrible. By necessity, this work is made without emotion, without connection, without love. — Abby Geni

The photographer is a thief who chooses what he steals (which, at this stage of the crisis, is a luxury) and does not democratize the image, that is to say, the photographer selects the pictures, a privilege which ought to be granted to the person being photographed. — Subcomandante Marcos

I didn't see any difference between being a photographer or being an artist. I didn't make those boundaries. If someone wants to think it's art, that's great, but I'll let history decide. — David LaChapelle

And if a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it's as though I've neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up. I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible. — Richard Avedon

The public is being spoiled by good technical quality photographs in magazines, on television, in the movies, and they have become bored. The disease of our age is this boredom and a good photographer must successfully combat it. The only way to do this is by invention - by surprise. — Alexey Brodovitch

Use anger to emotionalize whatever thing you intend to do in life - being a painter, a poet or a photographer — Gordon Parks

There were some advantages to being a woman photographer. I think women have more empathy with the subject. — Annie Leibovitz

Photography is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossibly difficult. It is easy because its technical rudiments can readily be mastered by anyonwith a few simple instructions. It is difficult because, while while the artist working in any other medium begins with a blank surface and gradually brings his conception into being, the photographer is the only imagemaker who begins with the picture completed. His emotions, his knowledge, and his native talent are brought into focus and fixed beyond recall the moment the shutter of his camera has closed. — Edward Steichen

I went from being an underpaid ad man to quite a successful photographer in a very short time. Success breeds confidence and as soon as I got properly confident, I developed my own style. After that I never looked back. — Derek Ridgers

I'm a terrible photographer.I'm not being modest. My photos really are crap. But in a way, the more the photo is crap, the better to paint from. — Chantal Joffe

There's nothing wrong with being a fashion photographer, but it's a bit limited. — David Bailey

You have to focus on what you are doing, not just as a photographer, but as a human being. — Anders Petersen

I started being a photographer because I liked fashion. I liked the idea of dressing up and changing my look. I got earrings, dyed my hair. I would dress like a fashion photo. — Mario Testino

In some areas, [Getty Images has] more images than the rest of the market put together. But libraries are being built up at a terrific pace. A photographer in a lifetime will produce maybe a million images, and there are about 15,000 professionals at work out there. — Mark Getty

Fantasy isn't something I put into the pictures; I don't try and inject them with a sense of play. But it's about being an honest photographer; a photograph is as much of a mirror of the photographer as it is the subject. — Tim Walker

None of us is born with the right face. It's a tough job being a portrait photographer. — Imogen Cunningham

It's weird being a photographer because you really have to divorce yourself from the image. — Ryan McGinley

You know, the Chinese don't like to be photographed because they believe that a part of their life is being taken away by the photographer. And in a way, they're right. The photographer is trying to get the prettiest moment of a life in his camera. — Bert Stern

I'd like to briefly state the accomplishment that we expect from a photographer. He must make the person being photographed forget that he has eaten from the tree of knowledge. — Albert Renger-Patzsch

The photographer discovers himself/herself being photographed and we can guess he is uncomfortable. Unsuccessfully he/she tries to recompose his posture and to look like a photographer taking photos. But no, he is and continues to be a spectator. The momentous fact of being photographed leads him to becoming an actor. And, as always, actors must assume a role, which is only an elegant way of avoiding to say they must choose sides, choose a faction, take an option. — Subcomandante Marcos

Being a photographer is like listening to music. If you have a camera, by just living your life you're bound to find some things that are worth taking a picture of. You don't have to be an audiophile to have taste in music. It happens through osmosis. — Christine Elise

My dad was actually against me being a photographer. He thought it was a dead-end job and that you end up doing baby pictures and weddings. — Rick Smolan

Anyone can take a nice picture of something pretty. Being able to show the beauty in ugliness and the interest in tedium - that's what makes you a real photographer. — Becca Mills

It's a very weird thing being a photographer. — Danny Lyon

You're looking for sexual tidbits as a female child, and the only ones that present themselves depict child rape or other violations (all my favorite books in my preteen years: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Clan of the Cave Bear, The World According to Garp, as well as the few R-rated movies I was allowed to see - Fame, most notably, with its indelible scene of Irene Cara being asked to take her shirt off and suck her thumb by a skeezy photographer who promises to make her a star), then your sexuality will form around that fact. There is no control group. I don't even want to talk about "female sexuality" until there is a control group. And there never will be. — Maggie Nelson

Forget about the profession of being a photographer. First be a photographer and maybe the profession will come after. — Christopher Anderson

Sometimes when I'm being photographed, I hear the voice of this photographer who told me when I was about six while he was taking my school photo that I didn't have a nice smile, and I shouldn't smile in photos. — Brad Goreski

I don't think at that time I realized how important it was and how important it was for me to be here and carry on that legacy in our family of being a photographer. — Kim Weston

I can get obsessed by anything if I look at it long enough. That's the curse of being a photographer. — Irving Penn

Being a digital photographer I'm in awe of the older generation of photographers who created all those iconic cinematic style images on film, such as Man Ray's portrait of the photographer Lee Miller. — Paul Walker

There is a narrative behind every image. I often imagine being able to see the photographer standing behind the camera, or perhaps crouching or running with it. — James Welling

Once I became a photographer, it stopped me being scared or intimidated by gangs of young men of whatever stripe. Initially, I could hide behind my camera but eventually I came to realize that if I was polite and friendly to them, then they probably would be to me too - a good life lesson. — Derek Ridgers

I was in Florida with Burt Stern, the photographer who shot Marilyn Monroe on the beach with a sweater, and we smoked a joint. The bathing suit kept coming off in the water, and I just ripped it off. I was very comfortable being naked. — Rosanna Arquette

Think like a photographer. Look at every vignette in your home like it's being shot for a shelter magazine and style accordingly. — Jonathan Adler

I love storytelling, I love being a visual person, and it just made perfect sense to be an underwater photographer and explore the ocean and work with scientists. — Brian Skerry

The way someone who's being photographed presents himself to the camera, and the effect of the photographer's response on that presence, is what the making of a portrait is all about. — Richard Avedon

In these times aesthetic taste is dismissed as irrelevant. Well, I am perverse, for that reason I am more drawn to it than ever. I have been described as having style, of being a mannered photographer ... it's some people's quarrel with my work and others' fascination. — Deborah Turbeville

I never thought of being a performer, never thought of being a singer, never thought of being a photographer. It's just the trajectory of my work. I go to the medium that serves the vision. — Patti Smith

Being a photographer is making people look at what I want them to look at. — Ruth Orkin