Photographer Quotes & Sayings

Art is a captured emotion. When I say this I mean all artists, whether you are a photographer, a writer, or sculptor, you are trying to capture the way someone or something made you feel. As a story teller I am trying to captivate the audience and allow them to feel just a small portion of the emotion I am desperately trying to preserve. — Tommy Tran

I have a completely worthless degree: a BS in Photojournalism from Boston University (BU). With this degree, I suppose I could have gotten a job teaching grade school kids how to photograph their relatives, but knowing about B&W photo processing and developing and how to shoot a picture story is good basic info that every photographer should have. — Peter Menzel

The act of photography is like going on a hunt in which photographer and camera merge into one indivisible function. This is a hunt for new states of things, situations never seen before, for the improbable, for information. — Vilem Flusser

The Concerned Photographer produces images in which genuine human feeling predominates over commercial cynicism or disinterested formalism. — Cornell Capa

The portrait-photograph is a closed field of forces. Four image-repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art. — Roland Barthes

Sometimes photographers mistake emotion for what makes a great street photograph. — Garry Winogrand

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

One view of photography is that it is a zen-like act which captures reality with its pants down - so that the vital click shows the anatomy bare. In this, the photographer is invisible but essential. A computer releasing the shutter would always miss the special moment that the human sensibility can register. For this work, the photographer's instinct is his aid, his personality a hindrance. — Peter Brook

Especially when you are advertising a product, I talk to the photographer and we create a character - it always gives you more freedom because it makes it less about yourself. — Penelope Cruz

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

One of my basic feelings is that the mind, and the heart alike, of the photographer must be dedicated to the glory, the magic, and the mystery of light. The mystery of time, the magic of light, the enigma of reality - and their interrelationships - are my constant themes and preoccupations. — Clarence John Laughlin

I'm kind of a walking photographer, i love exploring new places. One day I was taking a break during an excursion in the Broceliande forest, looking for the best place to settle, when I discovered a small clearing with a tree without leaves. I stayed for hours looking around, taking some pictures and I found Le Coq lying down under the tree. The tree's branches were rising as if to touch the sky. — Jacques Lecoq

In conclusion, the idea of direction on the part of the photographer has its greatest value when its processes are least discernible to the spectator. — Arthur Rothstein

I was so lucky that I got to meet certain people. It came through Roddy McDowall, who had become a photographer and would do these portraits of celebrities. Then he would get another well-known person to write a thing. He photographed me when I was 15 or 16, and he got Jason Robards to write the thing because he was sort of my mentor. And Roddy would invite me to these dinner parties that were insane. Like, Elizabeth Taylor and Maureen O'Hara and people that were just crazy. I still can't really believe that I met them. — Winona Ryder

Photographers are victims of paradox, tracking the impermanent to make it permanent. — Ray Metzker

I don't particularly care about photographic authorship. Whether an astronaut who doesn't even have a viewfinder makes an image, a robotic camera, a military photographer, or Mike Light really doesn't matter. What matters is the context of the final photograph and the meaning it generates within that context. — Michael Light

In every photographer there is something of a stroller. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

A photographer must be aware of and concerned about the words that accompany a picture. These words should be considered as carefully as the lighting, exposure and composition of the photograph. — Arthur Rothstein

The head of the photographer is more important than his camera — Philippe Halsman

The picture is not made by the photographer, the picture is more good or less good in function of the relationship that you have with the people you photograph. — Sebastiao Salgado

When I first started to take photographs in Czechoslovakia, I met this old gentleman, this old photographer, who told me a few practical things. One of the things he said was, "Josef, a photographer works on the subject, but the subject works on the photographer." — Josef Koudelka

[Postmodern photography] implies the exhaustion of the image universe: it suggests that a photographer can find more than enough images already existing in the world without the bother of making new ones. — Andy Grundberg

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

The artist who thinks negatively about his or her work invites others to think about it negatively as well. — Brooke Shaden

A few photographers make a killing; the rest can't make a living. — Bill Jay

My mom is a painter and photographer and my grandfather was an artist, so I've always been surrounded by creative people. — Dylan Lauren

A mad, keen photographer needs to get out into the world and work and make mistakes. — Sam Abell

I always feel when you work with an artist and whenever I work with a really good photographer, I try to give him or her their own artistic freedom because that's the way you get the best work or at least the most interesting work. — Helen Mirren

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

Within every man and woman a secret is hidden, and as a photographer it is my task to reveal it if I can. — Yousuf Karsh

The influence of mystery is the greatest influence. — Paul Caponigro

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

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

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

In a way, it's like the photographer always has his vision of me. The pictures that I'm known for are not really my image, they're always the photographer's vision of me. I can look a hundred different ways, but what people see of me in pictures is not really my image. — Kate Moss

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

I sell my first book to Random House, a memoir of my years as a war photographer, for twice my NBC salary. — Deborah Copaken Kogan

A camera exposes more than just an image. It also exposes the photographer. — Steve Coleman

The photographer does the world a great disservice when he leaves his camera at home. — Mark Denman

Forget what it was. Look at what it is. — Jay Maisel

Fall in love. Every day. With everything. With life. If you can fall in love, you can be a photographer. I think that is absolutely essential. — Ruth Bernhard

What is right? Simply put, it is any assignment in which the photographer has a significant spiritual stake ... spiritually driven work constitutes the core of a photographer's contribution to culture. — William Albert Allard

Thanks, Ms Wilding.'

She raised one eyebrow. 'Who?'

'You must be Tom's daughter, the photographer. You look like him. A prettier version, sexy, even.' His laugh was a smoky rumble as he spun on his heel.

'Don't presume to know anything about me, Mr Lawson.'

He hefted his pack and strode away, power in the length of stride. — Helene Young

There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer. — Ansel Adams

I looked around at what my colleagues were doing, and asked myself, 'What relationship has it with what's going on?' I found there was a great distortion of contemporary life. Photographers were interested only in certain things. A visually interesting place, people who were either very rich or very poor, and nostalgia. — Martin Parr

I had been a fashion photographer for over ten years, but I'd always been dissatisfied with what I was doing. It was all about selling people, and I got disheartened by the whole industry. — Giles Duley

If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this. — James Whistler

You scientists are the worst photographers in the world and you need the best photographers in the world and I'm the one to do it. — Berenice Abbott

Up to and including the moment of exposure, the photographer is working in an undeniably subjective way. By his choice of technical approach, by the selection of the subject matterand by his decision as to the exact cinematic instant of exposure, he is blending the variables of interpretation into an emotional whole. — W. Eugene Smith

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

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

We see the world through our experience. — John Paul Caponigro

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

The whole world is there for you. Gifts will happen, but only if you are patient with life itself, the shooting process, and your own limitations. — Jay Maisel

When the British-Malaysian photographer Ian Teh first worked in China, more than a decade ago, he rendered it as a nation of people in Technicolor. — Evan Osnos

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 very lucky that I've worked mainly with two amazing photographers in David Sims and Steven Meisel. — Guido Palau

Sometimes they are a matter of luck; the photographer could not expect or hope for them. Sometimes they are a matter of patience, waiting for an effect to be repeated that he has seen and lost or for one that he anticipates. — Bill Brandt

Choice or freedom of choice is just an existential concern. But for photographers, it's a lifetime's preoccupation. — Marc Riboud

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

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

When everything that is called art was well and truly riddled with rheumatism, the photographer lit the thousands of candles whose power is contained in his flame, and the sensitive paper absorbed by degrees the blackness cut out of some ordinary object. He had invented a fresh and tender flash of lightning. — Tristan Tzara

The photographer, even in fashion and portraiture, has to have a standpoint. It's important to know what you stand for, no? Most people just take pictures, but they stand for nothing. They follow trends and don't know why. — Peter Lindbergh

Once a photographer is convinced that the camera can lie and that, strictly speaking, the vast majority of photographs are camera lies, inasmuch as they tell only part of a story or tell it in distorted form, half the battle is won. Once he has conceded that photography is not a naturalistic medium of rendition and that striving for naturalism in a photograph is futile, he can turn his attention to using a camera to make more effective pictures. — Andreas Feininger

You should be constantly asking yourself: What do I want to say next? What do I believe in? Who am I? What is my image? To be a successful photographer, you have to have a unique point of view otherwise you'll get lost in the mix. — Mario Sorrenti

The photographer's problem is to see clearly the limitations and at the same time the potential qualities of his medium, for it is precisely here that honesty no less than intensity of vision is the pre-requisite of a living expression. The fullest realization of this is accomplished without tricks of process or manipulation, through the use of straight photographic methods. — Paul Strand

The only thing we photographers really want more than life, more than sex, more than anything, is to be invisible. — Philip Jones Griffiths

Incidentally, part of a photographer's gift should be with people. You can do some wonderful work if you know how to make people understand what you're doing and feel all right about it, and you can do terrible work if you put them on the defense, which they all are at the beginning. You've got to take them off their defensive attitude and make them participate. — Walker Evans

A photographer is like a writer ... you're writing with your lens so make sure you tell a good story. — Habib Umar Bin Hafiz

As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art. — Susan Sontag

In my stolen photographs
for the photographer must be a thief, he must steal instants of other people's time to make his own tiny eternities
it was this intimacy I sought, hte closeness of the living and the dead. — Salman Rushdie

In previous ages the word 'art' was used to cover all forms of human skill. The Greeks believed that these skills were given by the gods to man for the purpose of improving the condition of life. In a real sense, photography has fulfilled the Greek ideal of art; it should not only improve the photographer, but also improve the world. — David Hurn

Well, I liked it - that was the main thing. I liked it, but I didn't think of it in terms of a career. I didn't really know; I didn't really think about it. One thing just led to another until finally I quit my job as a salesman and found myself working as a photographer. — Herb Ritts

I was making photographs of the world long before I was a photographer. — Marcey Jacobson

I was brought up on art. My father thought I had a great hand at art and sent me to art school. But he did not want me to become a photographer. — Imogen Cunningham

Photography's a case of keeping all the pores of the skin open, as well as the eyes. A lot of photographers today think that by putting on the uniform, the fishing vest, and all the Nikons, that that makes them a photographer. But it doesn't. It's not just seeing. It's feeling. — Don McCullin

There really isn't anything that you could call 'bad' color. It all has to do with the amount of color you use and in what context it appears. — Jay Maisel

The herculean task of a photographer is to capture a momentary frame as beautiful in reality, as it would be in a dream. — Ansel Adams

Thirty-six satisfactory exposures on a roll means a photographer is not trying anything new — Freeman Patterson

Believe in yourself. Listen to the photographers you work with, and try to be professional at all time. — Alessandra Ambrosio

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

Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest. — Lisette Model

[My advice to a beginning photographer is] sit down with a pencil and paper and think about what your life is about. What you are about. Don't even take a camera into your hands before you figure that out. — Tina Barney

My mother was a famous photographer for actresses, including Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, and so many. I remember I went to school close to my mother's studio, and for years, I went to the studio after school and just watched how she captured these beauties. — Dario Argento

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

It's not how a photographer looks at the world that is important. It's their intimate relationship with it. — Antoine D'Agata

I'm not a good photographer, not a good writer. I'm a pretty regular person whose insecurity is so pervasive that it makes me always feel vulnerable. — Sally Mann

The artist is always concerned with a total view of the world. However, when the photographer takes a picture ... the edge of his picture is just as interesting as the middle, one can only guess at the existence of a whole, and the view presented seems chosen by chance. — Eugene Delacroix

Your own photography is never enough. Every photographer who has lasted has depended on other peoples pictures too - photographs that may be public or private, serious or funny, but that carry with them a reminder of community. — Robert Adams

I only know how to approach a place by walking. For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown, or the secret heat of the known awaits just around the corner. — Alex Webb

No beast of reality, or creature of imagination, is as terrible as mankind. Or as loving. It's a contradiction. I've always liked contradictions. Today I see both sides of the coin unveiled in gruesome and beautiful imagery, captured by my eyes and filed away in my mind, like still shots taken by a world-renowned photographer. — David Estes

Every year the aspiring photographer brought a stack of his best prints to an old, honored photographer, seeking his judgment. Every year the old man studied the prints and painstakingly ordered them into two piles, bad and good. Every year the old man moved a certain landscape print into the bad stack. At length he turned to the young man: "You submit this same landscape every year, and every year I put it on the bad stack. Why do you like it so much?" The young photographer said, "Because I had to climb a mountain to get it." A — Annie Dillard

It's not just when you shoot, or what you shot, or where you shoot, it's the combination of the three. — Jay Maisel

Photography is inherently an analytic discipline. Where a painter starts with a blank canvas and builds a picture, a photographer starts with the messiness of the world and selects a picture. A photographer standing before houses and streets and people and trees and artifacts of a culture imposes an order on the scene - simplifies the jumble by giving it structure. He or she imposes this order by choosing a vantage point, choosing a frame, choosing a moment of exposure, and by selecting a plane of focus. — Stephen Shore

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

My first modeling job in Paris, the photographer said, 'Tue es belle,' which means, 'you are pretty,' and I thought he said, 'Tu es poubelle,' which means, 'you are the trash can.' I burst into tears. He was not happy about that. — Rachel Nichols

I suppose the primary intention of a documentary photographer is to document facts. My work often does this but it is not the primary intention. My intention is to make the best pictorial image I can. — Richard Billingham

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

When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.
"Oh, sure you know," the photographer said.
"She wants," said Jay Cee wittily, "to be everything. — Sylvia Plath