Quotes & Sayings About Life Through Photography

This is life. It is everywhere, and it is here for the taking. I am alive and I know this, now, in a more profound way than when I am doing anything else. These sights are ephemeral, fleeting treasures that have been offered to me and to me alone. No other person in the history of the world, anywhere in all of time and space, has been granted this gift to be here in my place. And I am privileged, through the camera, to take this moment away with me. That is why I photograph. — Bill Jay

It was not until I was in my forties, in the fifth decade of my life, that the sense of place, the spirit of place, became of paramount importance to me. It was then that I began my travels, that I discovered, through photography, the quality of light, and that I gradually became able to paint the mood of place. — Barbara Cooney

As in any person's life, there have been difficult moments: I have a son with Down's syndrome; through my photography, I have witnessed all manner of human degradation. But there have also been very happy moments. — Sebastiao Salgado

At the root of creativity is an impulse to understand, to make sense of random and often unrelated details. For me, photography provides an intersection of time, space, light, and emotional stance. One needs to be still enough, observant enough, and aware enough to recognize the life of the materials, to be able to 'hear through the eyes'. — Paul Caponigro

He nods, looking through the pictures on the screen on the back of his camera. Some relationships can only exist as memories. But unlike ephemeral digital images that can be sorted and deleted, we can't erase the past. We have to learn to live with all the images that are stored in love's archive, memories tagged good and bad. No Photoshopping. Accept the negative before moving forward. — Shannon Mullen

To deal with the chaos of life, I escape into the prism of glass, dancing to the visual music in my mind. My photographs express my interior movement from darkness into light and back. — Polly Norman

Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens. — Franz Kafka

But Bennie knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit. Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust! Bennie knew better than to say this stuff aloud. — Jennifer Egan

Yes, photography saved my life. Every time I go through something scary, traumatic, I survive by taking pictures. — Nan Goldin

In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding - at a distance, through the medium of photography - other people's pain. — Susan Sontag

It's a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to evaporate with the past, should exist only in memories glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photography forces us to see people before their future weighed down on them. Before they knew their endings. — Kate Morton

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

I found that I wanted to be best friends with almost all the women I interviewed because they had been through something. They were closing in on the circle of their journey and they had a kind of wisdom that comes from their long life. — Joyce Tenneson

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

Oftentimes she wondered what had happened to super 8. Sure, it made perfect sense that nobody wanted the hassle of spending money on a three-minute cartridge of film and threading it through a projector, but though digital cameras were convenient and cheap, Mandy didn't care. Super 8 had integrity, it wasn't just nostalgia, it was art, it was history, it was a little recording medium that somehow possessed the power to evoke lost memories, to turn back time, and there was something dazzling about waiting excitedly for a reel of film to come back in its yellow and red Kodak envelope, eating buttered popcorn while the projector paraded life's best moments, and capturing something beautiful in only three minutes. — Rebecca McNutt

Everything around us, dead or alive, in the eyes of a crazy photographer mysteriously takes on many variations, so that a seemingly dead object comes to life through light or by its surroundings ... To capture some of this - I suppose that's lyricism. — Josef Sudek

The truth is that you have to fight your way through brutal, ugly realities in order to find that moment of clarity, that one slant of light or shift in emotion that yields unexpected art. That's just as true for life as it is for crime scene photography. — Maggie Ybarra

My interest in photography did not begin with books or mentors, or with any burning desire to see the world through a camera. It evolved from an intense devotion to mountains and wilderness that eventually shaped all the parts of my life and brought them together. — Galen Rowell

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

Photography is inextricably linked with life; the photographer is not invisibly behind the camera but projecting a life-attitude through the lens to create an interference pattern with the image. Who he is, what he believes, not only becomes important to know intellectually, but also becomes revealed emotionally and visibly through a body of work. — Bill Jay

Through photography and image I have been afforded the privilege of sharing the stories and myths of people's lives with others. The process for me became self-revelatory. It was a process of soul-making, something all humans are engaged in, no matter their endeavor. I saw a part of myself in each person I photographed. I came to realize, through the alchemical process of living, that each life is important, no matter how little that life seems to offer. — J. Don Cook

! discovered photography completely by chance. My wife is an architect; when we were young and living in Paris, she bought a camera to take pictures of buildings. For the first time, I looked through a lens - and photography immediately started to invade my life. — Sebastiao Salgado

Photography is a life of learning. That's all I want from photography. I don't want the money. I don't need the fame. I don't need the admiration. I'd like all of those things, but I don't need them. Because what I get from photographing is learning. I have spent my life learning by looking through a lens. — Rondal Partridge

It is the purpose of life that each of us strives to become actually what he or she is potentially. Each photographer, then, should be obsessed with stretching towards that goal through an understanding of others and the world we inhabit. When that happens, the results, like photographs, are really the expressions of the life of the maker. — David Hurn