My Photography Quotes & Sayings

I seem to walk in the world as two people. The normal everyday-me is as preoccupied, unobservant and oblivious to visual clues as I ever was. Then there is the photographer-me, the one who has a camera in hand and a specific project in mind, and then the world suddenly jumps to life with potential pictures, as if a switch had been thrown in my brain and a different person is looking out of the same eyes. — Bill Jay

I see my finished platinum print (in the viewfinder) in all its desired qualities, before my exposure. — Edward Weston

Photography is my one recreation and I think it should be done well. — Lewis Carroll

[photography] ... wanted to understand, to master for myself, all the processes involved, and to manipulate them in my own way. — Oliver Sacks

'Woman on the Plaza,' with its distinct horizon, snow-like surfaces, wintry wall, stunning sunlight, sharp shadows, and hurrying figure, would become the most biographical of my photographs - an abstract image of the landscape and life of northern Ohio where I grew up and first practiced photography. — Sam Abell

My photography is the result of being there at the right moment. — Rene Burri

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

I believe in the relation between photography and music; And thats my inspiration. — Man Ray

they signaled my eternal gratitude to the boy sitting silently in the dark. The boy as gifted at photography as I was at music. He was my heart. The heart freely given to me as a child. The heart that made up one half of my own. The boy who, though breaking inside, loved me so deeply that he gave me this farewell. Gave me, in the present, the dream that my future never could. My soul mate who captured moments. — Tillie Cole

Outside the window of the balcony room, three
metal guys were building a new patio for the
defunct pool. The pool was slowly filling with
red dust carried across the highway by intermittent
breezes. At some point I stood up from the table
and pulled back the curtain a bit and watched the
half naked bodies of the guys climbing in and out
of their trucks for tools or to turn up the volume
of the music. I felt like a detective with only the window
glass and the curtains camouflaging my desire. For a
moment I was afraid the intensity of my sexual fantasies
would become strangely audible; the energy of
the thought images would become so loud that
all three guys would turn simultaneously like
witnesses to a nearby car crash. — David Wojnarowicz

The world makes up my pictures, not me. — Lee Friedlander

I suffered first as a child from discrimination, poverty ... So I think it was a natural follow from that that I should use my camera to speak for people who are unable to speak for themselves. — Gordon Parks

The reason I often say, for me, photography is analogous to poetry, for my kind of work more so than journalism, is because it's so open to interpretation. And I'm very happy having different interpretations of it. — Alec Soth

I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do - that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse. — Diane Arbus

In many ways, unexpected results are what have most inspired my photography. — Harold Eugene Edgerton

In my teens I was interested in photography. Then I decided that I should learn something about the world of commerce. And I came to America at age 17 to escape Europe. I went to NYU - nothing better than being 17 years old and coming to New York. — Nicolas Berggruen

I often think of my work as visual haiku. It is an attempt to evoke and suggest through as few elements as possible rather than to describe with tremendous detail. — Michael Kenna

Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn't attending to. My photographs are intended to represent something you don't see. — Emmet Gowin

The New York book was a visual diary and it was also kind of personal newspaper. I wanted it to look like the news. I didn't relate to European photography. It was too poetic and anecdotal for me ... the kinetic quality of new york, the kids, dirt, madness - I tried to find a photographic style that would come close to it. So I would be grainy and contrasted and black. Id crop, blur, play with the negatives. I didn't see clean technique being right for New York. I could imagine my pictures lying in the gutter like the New York Daily News. — William Klein

To obey orders in this family has been my privilege for the last twenty years--a privilege which has been an unqualified pleasure, except perhaps when connected with the photography of deceased persons in an imperfect state of preservation. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Like my maestro, Juan Ribero, she believed that photography and painting are not competing arts but basically different: the painter interpets reality, and the camera captures it. In the former everything is fiction, while the second is the sum of the real plus the sensibility of the photographer. Ribero never allowed me sentimental or exhibitionist tricks-none of this arranging objects or models to look like paintings. He was the enemy of artificial compostion; he did not let me manipulate negatives or prints, and in general he scorned effects of spots or diffuse lighting: he wanted the honest and simple image, although clear in the most minute details. — Isabel Allende

The oceans are in trouble. There are some serious problems out there that I believe are not clear to many people. My hope is to continually find new ways of creating images and stories that both celebrate the sea yet also highlight environmental problems. Photography can be a powerful instrument for change. — Brian Skerry

The effort of painting from life has cost my models a great deal of physical discomfort, and cost me a great deal of money in model fees ... I have wanted to make the camera obsolete ... because, in my reading about early 20th century art, I found that the most frequently used argument made in favor of abstraction was that the camera made realist painting obsolete. — Philip Pearlstein

Actually, when I first started dabbling in photography, I was still working for my parents as a salesman. — Herb Ritts

Photography has been a passion of mine since I was 15. After my kids were born I found myself incorporating my photography into different art endeavors and from there it just blossomed. — Angela Cartwright

Like any corporation, I have the benefit of the brainpower of everyone who is working for me. It all ends up being my work, the corporate me, but everyone extends ideas and comes up with suggestions. — Chuck Close

There was a time in my life that I may not have been that nice, and now I'm in a position to contribute to the education of young people, and teach them to be compassionate, be more loving, more caring, to not use profanity, to not pollute the environment - these are things that I address in my photography. I — Jamel Shabazz

Photography was a blessing because it filled my time. — Jessica Lange

I think of my work as very polarizing; either people really do like it and are touched by it or they really don't get it at all. It's not accessible to all people at the same level. — Joyce Tenneson

Photography has saved my life, over and over again. — Laurel Nakadate

I'm really into my photography and am trying to catch up with digital generation - I was used to the old 35mm cameras. — David Suchet

My father was a psycho-analyst and I think that fact was very influential on my development as an artist. Trying to search beneath the surface of things for an unexpected sense of mystery. — Gregory Crewdson

If it's a likeness, alone, it's not a success. If, through my portraits, you can come to know the subjects more meaningfully, if it synthesizes your feelings toward someone whose work has imprinted itself on your mind
if you see a photograph and say, 'Yes, this is the person,' with a little new insight
that is a beautiful experience. — Yousuf Karsh

When a moment in front of me appears to be particularly special, whether it be by beauty or experience, I capture it. I usually find a reason to justify taking that photo - symmetry, or color, or contrast - and it's my hope that my photography sheds light onto what I see and do on a daily basis. — Connor Franta

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not. — Aleksandar Hemon

I don't like captions. I prefer people to look at my pictures and invent their own stories. — Josef Koudelka

I have a cartoon I'm developing with Adult Swim called 'Monster Town U.S.A.,' so I'm busy doing that. Trying to do a coffee-table book of my photography that's been requested of me a couple of times. I'm constantly busy. — Norman Reedus

To my father, art had no restrictions. He was a true 'American Primitive.' He greatly enjoyed sketching and photography, carrying a camera with him whenever he could, — John Carter Cash

I am just a middle-class farm boy from Dodge City and my grandparents were wheat farmers. I thought painting, acting, directing and photography were all part of being an artist. I have made my money that way. And I have had some fun. It's not been a bad life. — Dennis Hopper

I read like a crazy person, I play the piano, and I'm a photographer. I always say my photography keeps me sane. I spend a lot of time in the darkroom. It's a very solitary, quiet life when I'm not working. — Alaina Huffman

What I've always liked about photography is that it's such a direct way of showing what's on my mind. I see something. I show it to you. — Zoe Leonard

So when I became interested in photography and further being inspired by the work that I saw of Ansel and others, it was a natural extension to go back to these places that I knew as a kid and explore them with my camera. — John Sexton

In 1850, August Salzmann photographed, near Jerusalem, the road to Beith-Lehem (as it was spelled at the time): nothing but stony ground, olive trees; but three tenses dizzy my consciousness: my present, the time of Jesus, and that of the photographer, all this under the instance of 'reality' - and no longer through the elaborations of the text, whether fictional or poetic, which itself is never credible down to the root. — Roland Barthes

I try to consider each body of work on its own terms, discretely, so terms like 'sculpture' or 'photography', in their broad sense, don't really enter into my thinking. — Walead Beshty

I'll be in # Jharkhand along with Kaustav Narayan Niyogi, who is directing the film and my director of photography for location hunting. I want to lock the locations before Christmas as everyone goes into vacation mode after that, — Pooja Bhatt

Portrait photography never had any charms for me, so I sought my subjects from the house-tops, and finally from the hill-tops and about the surrounding country; the taste strengthening as my successes became greater in proportion to the failures. — William Henry Jackson

The photograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style. Both in its way of informing, and in what it informs of, it is my source. — Gerhard Richter

Something that I consider 'my invention', since I haven't seen it done anywhere before is 'Super-speed photography'. Now normal high-speed photography involves either a very fast camera at a high frame rate or the act of 'freezing' the motion using flash, while the actual exposure is actually quite long. For much of my high-speed photography with flash I was using shutter speeds of two seconds to give me time to break or shoot whatever my subject was and trigger the flash with a sound activated device. But then I started playing with the idea of using the flash trigger of the camera to actually cause the event. — Desmond Downs

I consider myself very lucky. I'm known for photographing celebrities, but, in a nutshell, my first love is photography. — Douglas Kirkland

I seldom think when I take a picture. My eyes and fingers react - click. But first, it's most important to decide on the angle at which your photograph is to be taken. — Alfred Eisenstaedt

Photography begins not in the camera but in the
mind and the eye. The real work is one of noticing and appreciating, seeing things clearly and differently, and
sharing that vision with others. I have developed my
vision and my photographic craft in order to bring
the beauty of nature to light in a fresh way that
can inspire and nourish people. — Bill Atkinson

I was given a small camera as a wedding gift from a very dear friend. My first pictures were taken on my honeymoon. As soon as I became familiar with the camera, I was intrigued with the possibilities of expression it offered. It was like a discovery for me. — Aaron Siskind

Wilderness, to me, is a spiritual necessity. The mysterious spiritual experience of being close to natural restored my soul [after the death of his son]. My experience reinforced by dedication to use the art of photography as an inspiration for others to work together to save nature's places of spiritual sanctuary for future generations. — Clyde Butcher

! 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

Perhaps there was more authentic danger in the photography that was banned - why shouldn't one be able to produce it? But this new enthusiasm finally caused us some trouble, and it suffices to say, if I remember correctly, that it was in this way that my thoughts turned to the young maidens. — Hans Bellmer

I still maintain several different outlets of artistry, like my music, photography, writing and all those things. I don't pigeonhole myself into one thing. I do all sorts of things, and that's so important to me. — Jesse Johnson

I don't write as many songs as I used to. But, I find myself writing for social media more - times have changed. And I love photography, so a lot of my creative energy gets caught up that way. — Arlo Guthrie

To me, photography was a completely new medium, and I did not ... feel the urge to transfer to it my ideas about painting. — John Gutmann

For a period of time, I carried cameras with me wherever I went, and then I realized that my interest in photography was turning toward the conceptual. So I wasn't carrying around cameras shooting stuff, I was developing concepts about what I wanted to shoot. And then I'd get the camera angle and do the job. — Leonard Nimoy

I could ramble on forever, I just love photography. It's my passion, it drives my family crazy. I live it and breathe it. — Russell James

My generation came at a time when photography was advancing by leaps and bounds, creating the impulse to experiment and seek new approaches. — Gjon Mili

I think I'm no different to my friends who are doctors or businessmen or architects - we all started watching films of the golden age together. But whether I'm making films or writing poetry or doing photography, it's very much rooted in my sense of unease. And that's really where everything goes back to. — Abbas Kiarostami

I like photography and writing and travel, so I have a lot of cerebral occupations. I am going to become a sailor and do a world tour on my yacht if I don't get any more work. — Audrey Tautou

I always feel it's necessary to look at my images from two distances. Here is my criterion: If I can look at it from a distance and then come up close but find nothing more to see, it's printed too large. It's not giving me any new information when I come up to it. — Bruce Barnbaum

I really try to divorce myself from any thought of possible use of this stuff. That's part of the discipline. My only purpose while I'm working is to try to make interesting photographs, and what to do with them is another act - an alter consideration. Certainly while I'm working, I want them to be as useless as possible. — Garry Winogrand

I am not one of those people who lives for work. I enjoy sculpting and photography and tennis and swimming. I simply do not have enough time. My life is not in control. — Pattie Maes

I never went to school for that. In high school we had photography, which was great. That was another moment of discovery. I had a great teacher - I can't even remember her name now. I ended up going to boarding school for my last high school years and they had a dark room there. Of course there was curfew; you were supposed to be in bed at a certain time. But I would sneak out and sneak into the dark room and work all night. — Jeff Vespa

And I don't like having my picture taken. I'm almost like an old African in that sense. I think it steals a bit of the soul. — Eric Clapton

My photos are my diary. Every photo is no more than the representation of a single day. And each day contains the past and the projection into the future. That's why I feel compelled to indicate the date on every picture I take. — Nobuyoshi Araki

Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited. — Ben Shahn

At 42, I decided to become a photographer because it offered a means of creative thought and action. I didn't rationalize this, I just felt it intuitively and followed my intuition, which I have never regretted. — Wynn Bullock

I've been the head of the photography program at Bard College for over 30 years, and I take that as seriously as I do my photography. My time is devoted to that too. — Stephen Shore

French Kiss - A Love Letter to Paris, is a tribute to many of the wonderful moments of romance, beauty, hope, and love that I have witnessed and been inspired by in Paris, my adopted home, over the past 40 years. I believe that photography is ultimately about sharing. I am excited to share, with the world, these moments of the heart that have touched my own, in this most beautiful city, Paris — Peter Turnley

Every day is a writing day. I get to my desk between 8 and 8:30 in the morning and then work through until 6pm, and then normally I'll take up whatever will be happening in the evening, usually painting or photography.
I do about four drafts total. I do handwritten drafts because I don't type and I have no wish to type. I mean, I know how to type, but I have no interest in putting the words down that way.
Maybe that's because I'm an artist and because I've always used a pen and so there's a sort of natural feel to it.
I don't know how familiar you are with Blake's illuminated texts, but you know very often he'll literally make words flower. It's really this glorious thing in bringing words and pictures into the same place, the same space. — Clive Barker

The fact is that the camera is literal if anything, which gives it something in common with a thermometer ... Often the tension that exists between the pictorial content of a photograph and its record of reality is the picture's true beauty. There is sleight of hand in photography ... you make the viewer think he's seeing everything while at the same time you make him realize he's not. I try to make my pictures seem reasonable and then, at the last minute, pull the rug from beneath the viewer's feet, very gently so there's a little thrill. — John Loengard

I feel, having the choices I had, I felt I had more control over my own medium than I did over photography. — Ben Shahn

I always said it kept me alive - photography - because it did. It was my catharsis. — Bruce Gilden

We are one human race, and there must be understanding among all men. For those who look at the problems of today, my big hope is that they understand. That they understand that the population is quite big enough, that they must be informed that they must have economic development, that they must have social development, and must be integrated into all parts of the world. — Sebastiao Salgado

Photography is humbling, it really is, and it really allows for me to atone for some of the missteps I've made throughout the course of my life. — Jamel Shabazz

No, I don't work here, I'm taking pictures of messy bathrooms for a photo essay on the American West. But I'm always up for clean, so if you want to pitch in, I've got Pine Sol and a sponge in my car ... It's that VW microbus parked next to the dumpster, and you don't need a key, just pull hard. — Pansy Schneider-Horst

I create other worlds, magical never-never lands where the camera is my weapon and the battles I fight are with the elements. i stretch the laws of the mind and displace people from their realities to capture a side of them they didn't even know they had. Photography has the ability to freeze people in this time and space - no matter what happens after that moment, it cannot change - they are exactly how i want them to be. — Tyler Shields

Beware of color theories. Theories in color photography are dangerous. The plain fact that there are so many of them proves my point. — Ernst Haas

I am inspired by great food, theater, books, the beach, black-and-white photography, and great vocalists, like Dianne Reeves, Alice Smith, and Shirley Horn. I am inspired by my mentor Diana Castle, who is guiding me towards a truth and honesty in my life and work that I have always longed for. — Erica Tazel

There's this way that photography is always about going out searching. I'm not the kind of a photographer who can photograph my home. — Justine Kurland

I don't really use still photography very much anymore except to document my work. — Robert Barry

[My mother] died a few months ago, and when she was dead I kissed her lips. For me it was a beautiful moment. From then on I started living with her, asking her from time to time if she was alright, if she was pleased with me. But these things are far greater than photography, and I probably shouldn't be speaking about them. — Mario Giacomelli

I need there to be documentary photographers, because my work is meta-documentary; it is a commentary about the documentary use of photography. — Joan Fontcuberta

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

The only nature I'm interested in is my own nature. — Aaron Siskind

My advice is: learn from the best or teach yourself. And do not bother at all if you do not have an exaggerated sense of curiosity. — David Hurn

Photography was the only thing that mattered in my life and I gave it everything. — Anton Corbijn

I'm not responsible for my photographs. Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. It's drowning yourself, dissolving yourself, and then sniff, sniff, sniff - being sensitive to coincidence. You can't go looking for it; you can't want it, or you won't get it. First you must lose your self. Then it happens. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

I can't always reach the image in my mind ... almost never, in fact ... so that the abstract image I create is not quite there, but it gets to the point where I can leave it. — Chuck Close

All aspects of photography interest me and I feel for the female body the same curiosity and the same love as for a landscape, a face or anything else which interests me. In any case, the nude is a form of landscape. There are no reasons for my photographs, nor any rules; all depends on the mood of the moment, on the mood of the model. — Jeanloup Sieff

My whole artistic life has been devoted to battling myself and my ability to externalize my deepest emotions. As I have gotten older, the work has become more direct, perhaps reflecting the fact that for the first time in my life I feel really free. I have been fascinated with wings all my life. I have had an obsession with transcendence, the need to push forward and metaphorically fly. — Joyce Tenneson

You've gotta taste the light, like my friend and fellow shooter Chip Maury says. And when you see light like this, trust me, it's like a strawberry sundae with sprinkles. — Joe McNally

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

My style hasn't changed much in all these sixty years. I still use, most of the time, existing light and try not to push people around. I have to be as much a diplomat as a photographer. People don't often take me seriously because I carry so little equipment and make so little fuss ... I never carried a lot of equipment. My motto has always been, "Keep it simple". — Alfred Eisenstaedt

Everybody's got to do something ... I'd been on my own since an early age and I thought I better find something to do to buy biscuits and stuff. From high school onwards I was earning my way with photography, one way or another, working in darkrooms and taking pictures of weddings, neighbors' children and so on. — Elliott Erwitt

Although I get a lot of ideas from things that have happened in my life, I see the final product as a place where my imagination meets my experience. What I love about photography is that nothing is really as it seems. — Laurel Nakadate