Greatest Photography Quotes & Sayings

We live in a time of the greatest precision and of maximum contrasts: photomontage offers us a means to express this. It shows ideas: photography shows us objects. — Herbert Bayer

More and more are turning to photography as a medium of expression as well as communication. The leavening of aesthetic approaches continues. While it is too soon to define the characteristic of the photographic style today, one common denominator, rooted in tradition, seems in the ascendancy. The direct use of the camera for what it can do best, and that is the revelation, interpretation, and discovery of the world of man and of nature. The greatest challenge to the photographer is to express the inner significance through the outward form. — Beaumont Newhall

Orson Welles was a force of nature, who just came in and wiped the slate clean. And Citizen Kane is the greatest risk-taking of all time in film. I don't think anything had even seen anything quite like it. The photography was also unlike anything we'd seen. The odd coldness of the filmmaker towards the character reflects his own egomania and power, and yet a powerful empathy for all of them
it's very interesting. It still holds up, and it's still shocking. It takes storytelling and throws it up in the air. — Martin Scorsese

The greatest moments are right in front of you. — Matthew Knisely

I felt that photography ought to start with and remain faithful to the appearance of the world, and in so doing record contradictions. The greatest pictures would then ... find wholeness in the torn world. — Robert Adams

A studio session ... provides the greatest chance for control. Even though there is total freedom, I still dislike studio photography and the contrived images that usually stem from this genre. — Eve Arnold

My greatest aim has been to advance the art of photography and to make it what I think I have, a great and truthful medium of history. — Mathew Brady

The greatest field of photography, for the literary interpretation of life, consists, to my mind, in its latent power to create, as it were, death for a single second. Any thing or person is, at will, made to die for a moment of time so immeasurably small that the return to life is effected without consciousness of the great adventure. (1928) — Pierre Mac Orlan

The greatest statesmen, philosophers, humanitarians ... have not been able to put an end to war. Why place that demand on photography? — James Nachtwey

Michaelangelo said the mirror is our greatest teacher. My use of mirrors in my work helps me uncover psychic layers. Often, the face is distorted in the mirror so it is much more than a simple reflection. Sometimes something surprising emerges - some darkness or secret appears without us knowing why or giving it permission. — Joyce Tenneson

A photographer must always work with the greatest respect for his subject and in terms of his own point of view. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Richard Avedon is a true genius of photography and one of the greatest artists of our time. — Donatella Versace

As a matter of fact, nearly all the greatest work is being, and has always been done, by those who are following photography for the love of it, and not merely for financial reasons. As the name implies, an amateur is one who works for love. — Alfred Stieglitz

The human body is first and foremost a mirror to the soul and its greatest beauty comes from that. — Auguste Rodin

Considering that knowledge of the chemical as well as the optical principles of photography was fairly widespread following Schulze's experiment (in 1725) ... the circumstance that photography was not invented earlier remains the greatest mystery in its history ... It had apparently never occurred to any of the multitude of artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who were in the habit of using the camera obscura to try to fix its image permanently. — Helmut Gernsheim

I think that's one of the greatest gifts you get if you're successful at something like music or film or photography - any of the arts - you can sit there and think. It's so much fun to sit there and think and wonder about the world and the universe. — Albert Hammond Jr.

The greatest compliment that I know how to pay another photographer is to say, 'I never would have made that photograph myself. I'm sure glad you did.' You hope along the way that maybe, once in a while, you do that for someone else. — John Sexton

Timothy O'Sullivan was, it seems to me, the greatest of the photographers because he understood nature first as architecture. — Robert Adams

The greatest tool at our command is the very thing that is photography. Light. Light is our paintbrush and it is a most willing tool in the hands of the one who studies it with a sufficient care. — Laura Gilpin

In music, recording, writing, photography, design, film-making and any other creative endeavour, it may be true that anyone can do it, but it is not quite as true as punk sometimes seemed to suggest that anyone can do it in a way that is appreciated by others. The key point is that, without determination and application, talent and ideas are just unrealised potential. That lesson-there for anyone who wishes to learn it-is perhaps punk's , and the Clash's, greatest legacy. — Marcus Gray

She believed photography to be the greatest of all art forms because it was simultaneously junk food and gourmet cuisine, because you could snap dozens of pictures in a couple of hours, then spend dozens of hours perfecting just a couple of them. — Tommy Wallach