Quotes & Sayings About Photographers

As photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs. Move on objects with your eye straight on, to the left, around on the right. Watch them grow large as they approach, group and regroup as you shift your position. Relationships gradually emerge and sometimes assert themselves with finality. And that's your picture. — Aaron Siskind

I can't stand when girls come to me and say they want to be a model, but they can't tell me who the top three photographers are in the world. They can't tell me who the top five biggest models are or name three cosmetics companies. They can't even name the top fashion magazines! You have to get it together and know your stuff. — Kimora Lee Simmons

C.S. Lewis admitted, when he was asked to set forth his beliefs, that he never felt less sure of them than when he tried to speak of them. Photographers know this frailty. To them words are a pallid, diffuse way of describing and celebrating what matters. Their gift is to see what will be affecting as a print. Mute. — Robert Adams

Photographers, you will never become artists. All you are is mere copiers. — Charles Baudelaire

What amazes me is that you can have 10 different photographers in the same room, and you see 10 different rooms. You realize how much of it is the person's perspective rather than the situation itself. — Rick Smolan

I think it is fair to say that all war photographers hide behind their cameras. I hid behind mine for years and years and years. It was a shield ... I think that the photographer in combat has a greater protection than the soldier who has a rifle in his hand. That camera has unbelievable protective power. — Carl Mydans

Armael shook his head. "The Origin created all creatures for a purpose."
"Are these supposed to rid the world of stupid photographers? — Pat Harris

As long as designers want to dress me, photographers want to take my picture and companies think my face will help their products, then I won't go anywhere until they're done with me. — Linda Evangelista

Fame is not just about being able to get out of a limo in Leicester Square, it's about trying to get into your house when there are eight photographers outside. When you think about being famous, you don't think about all that stuff. You think about the glamour. — Rick Astley

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

Photographers aren't artists, for goodness sake. — Diana Vreeland

I do find it strange, doing magazine shoots. Photographers always go, 'Why don't you like to have your picture taken? That's what you do for a living anyway. Just pretend you're acting. It's the same thing!' — James McAvoy

Many photographers feel their client is the subject. My client is a woman in Kansas who reads Vogue. I'm trying to intrigue, stimulate, feed her. My responsibility is to the reader. The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader. — Irving Penn

We know photographers make frames, but we deeply believe they can also create frameworks. — Susan Meiselas

I've never, ever in my life touched a photographer. Some of the cruellest things I've ever said have been to photographers who are chasing me down the street, some of the sharpest, most efficient emotional barbs. And they know that in that moment, in that one-to-one wit competition, they just got smashed. — Russell Crowe

I've done over 125 posters and I have worked with some of the best photographers in the world. They made me America's Number one Pin Up. — Cindy Margolis

In making portraits, I refuse to photograph myself as do so many photographers. My style is the style of the people I photograph. — Lotte Jacobi

I have mixed feelings about those sorts of things. When I see it done by interesting young people, I think it's very valid. But when established photographers, people in their forties, copy me and get a lot of money, well, I find that to be very stupid. — Helmut Newton

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

There are good photographers who might elevate themselves to the ranks of the great simply by burning most of their work. — Janet Malcolm

Some photographers take reality ... and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation. — Ansel Adams

If the subject is in a suffering circumstance, it is all the more preferable to apply craft to the utmost. Call it art or not, we photographers should always try to pass on our observations with the utmost clarity. — Dennis Stock

My advice to photographers is to get out there in the field and take photographs but also if they are students to finish their course, learn as many languages as possible, go to movies, read books visit museums, broaden your mind. — Martine Franck

When I went to L.A., I started modeling, hoping to travel and learn from photographers. It led to auditions to do commercials. — Beth Riesgraf

I think that something photographers find about me is that I work really hard to make sure I know what they want before I start shooting. — Gigi Hadid

Photographers usually want to photograph facts and things. But I'm interested in the nature of the thing itself. A photograph of someone sleeping tells me nothing about their dream state; a photograph of a corpse tells me nothing about the nature of death. My work is about my life as an event, and I find myself to be very temporal, transient. — Duane Michals

Photographers who carry 60 pounds of equipment up a hill to photograph a view are not suffering enough, although their whining causes enough suffering among their listeners. No, if they really expect us to respect their search for enlightenment and artistic expression, in [the] future they will drag the equipment up the hill by their genitals and take the view with a tripod leg stuck through their foot. — Bill Jay

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

Today's photographers think differently. Many can't see real light anymore. They think only in terms of strobe - sure, it all looks beautiful but it's not really seeing. If you have the eyes to see it, the nuances of light are already there on the subject's face. If your thinking is confined to strobe light sources, your palette becomes very mean - which is the reason I photograph only in available light. — Alfred Eisenstaedt

Why do photographers photograph? To make unreality visible. — Bill Jay

Laymen learn to read photographs the way they do headlines, skipping over them quickly to get the gist of what is being said. Photographers, on the other hand, study them with the care and attention to detail one might give to a difficult scientific paper or a complicated poem. — Howard S. Becker

Digital art software has empowered both the painterly side of photographers, and the photographer side of painters. — Buffy Sainte-Marie

I feed on other people's creativity, photographers, artists of every kind. Sometimes a feeling that you get listening to a song can be so powerful. I've wanted to write whole scripts around what I felt just listening to a piece of music. I think music is important, and surrounding your visual field with stimulating things. — James Cameron

My mountaineering skills are not important to my best photographs, but they do add a component to my work that is definitely a bit different than that of most photographers. — Galen Rowell

I think that people have to just go with their gut and follow their passion if they're photographers. — Carol Friedman

Most photographers seem to operate with a pane of glass between themselves and their subjects. They just can't get inside and know the subject. — W. Eugene Smith

We look at the world and see what we have learned to believe is there. We have been conditioned to expect ... but, as photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs ... if you look very intensely and slowly, things will happen that you never dreamed of before. — Aaron Siskind

Photography is very presumptuous. Photographers are always photographing other people's lives - something they know nothing about - and drawing great inferences into it. — Duane Michals

There are those photographers who have made a whole career doing commercial work but have never had a museum show, and then there are others who've only had museum shows but couldn't survive for five seconds in the real world of photography. But I've done absolutely everything. — Duane Michals

I guess I'm adaptable. You know, I turn up at work and [photographers] can kind of do what they want with me, really. — Kate Moss

I didn't take inspiration from other photographers, which in a way helped to find my own images. — Peter Lindbergh

I was crazy about goal keeping. In Russia and the Latin countries, that gallant art had been always surrounded with a halo of singular glamour. Aloof, solitary, impassive, the crack goalie is followed in the streets by entranced small boys. He vies with the matador and the flying ace as an object of thrilled adulation. His sweater, his peaked cap, his kneeguards, the gloves protruding from the hip pocket of his shorts, set him apart from the rest of the team. He is the lone eagle, the man of mystery, the last defender. Photographers, reverently bending one knee, snap him in the act of making a spectacular dive across the goal mouth to deflect with his fingertips a low, lightning-like shot, and the stadium roars in approval as he remains for a moment or two lying full length where he fell, his goal still intact. — Vladimir Nabokov

I'm happy to help Crest Whitestrips on their mission to inspire photographers everywhere to capture smile moments and would encourage aspiring photographers to express themselves through their photos. — Nigel Barker

The word "photography" can be interpreted as "writing with light" or "drawing with light." Some photographers are producing beautiful photographs by drawing with light.. Some other photographers are trying to tell something with their photographs. They are writing with light ... — Philippe Halsman

There are photographers who don't really engage with their subject. It's a really unfortunate phrase, but they take their photo and they leave with it. It works but I think it ultimately limits how profound the work can be. — Sebastian Junger

I don't want a gang of shouting, arguing, law-breaking photographers to camp out everywhere we are, all day every day, to continue traumatizing my kids, — Jennifer Garner

I got a lot of flak originally for writing with photographs, because the great cliche in photography is that one photograph is worth a thousand words, and photographers are usually dodo birds anyway. — Duane Michals

I began photographing in 1946. Before that, I was a painter and drawer, with my mother and father's support. They were a bit pissed when I went into photography. They thought photographers were guys who took pictures at weddings. — Harold Feinstein

Rex has photographers around the world - it's a higher touch business: there are a lot of relationships involved. If you throw an event, there are certain photographers you've worked with before and you want there. — Jon Oringer

He was very concerned about his children potentially being kidnapped or attached, and that's why they were covered up. When he went to Berlin zoo, there were 200 photographers. — Martin Bashir

I believe that ... my first successes in my out-of-focus pictures were a fluke. That is to say, that when focusing and coming to something which, to my eye, was very beautiful, I stopped there instead of screwing on the lens to the more definite focus which all other photographers insist upon ... — Julia Margaret Cameron

I still think photographers should be lashed out at. They should be put in a cage where you can poke them with a stick for a quarter. But not in a hostile way, just for giggles. They really are on the attack against mankind; it's a disease. They should be helped somewhere. But I'd still like to poke them with a stick. — Sean Penn

I look at my first appointment book from 1965 and I get dizzy. I was constantly in a phone booth calling photographers. — Lauren Hutton

Deliberately, on every historic occasion, we piously fake events for the benefit of photographers, while the actual event often occurs in a different fashion; and we have the effrontery to call these artful dress rehearsals authentic historic documents. — Lewis Mumford

Those who call themselves art photographers are pompous, arrogant egoists. — Arnold Newman

I went on a long trip through South America with Prince Charles where I was the only journalist there - a couple of photographers but no other writers. — Anthony Holden

The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity'
of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: 'The subject,' says one handbook for amateur photographers, 'must be simple, free of useless accessories; this is called the Search for Unity. — Roland Barthes

Some photographers work on the same image for hours and hours and then use the first picture that they took. — Alice Dellal

The American and British soldiers who liberated the dying inmates from camps in Germany believed that they had discovered the horrors of Nazism. The images their photographers and cameramen captured of the corpses and the living skeletons at Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald seemed to convey the worst crimes of Hitler...this was far from the truth. The worst was in the ruins of Warsaw, or the fields of Treblinka, or the marshes of Belarus, or the pits of Babi Yar. — Timothy Snyder

Danny Lyon is one of my favorite photographers. — Rachel Kushner

Conflict photographers grapple with two worlds that are themselves often in conflict - the one where bombs fall and bullets fly, where adrenaline runs high, and the other, back home, which is comparatively secure, and where the big event of the day may involve selecting swatches of fabric for a new sofa. — Alan Huffman

I am not a photojournalist and certainly not used to the Jason Bourne type stuff that some photographers have to deal with. — Platon

People were murdered for the camera; and some photographers and a television camera crew departed without taking a picture in the hope that in the absence of cameramen acts might not be committed. Others felt that the mob was beyond appeal to mercy. They stayed and won Pulitzer Prizes. Were they right? — Harold Evans

There's people outside our house; you get followed by photographers; you can't go out and have a cup of coffee with a friend without someone coming up to you. — Jack Osbourne

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

I was raised around a lot of artists, musicians, photographers, painters and people that were in theater. Just having the art-communal hippie experience as a child, there wasn't a clear line that was drawn. We celebrated creative experience and creative expression. We didn't try and curtail it and stunt any of that kind of growth. — Jared Leto

When I was young, I did actually model and was much photographed by famous photographers. But I was always a bookworm. — Marina Warner

A close friend of mine, Annie Leibovitz, who I've known for forty years, photographs celebrities every single day of the week but they all seem to look the same even though she's one of the most creative photographers alive. They all just look the same. Brad Pitt is a great actor but all the pictures of Brad Pitt look the same. — Lawrence Schiller

With each assignment, I weigh the looming possibility of being killed, and I chastise myself for allowing fear to hinder me. War photographers aren't supposed to get scared. — Lynsey Addario

I'm aware of how lucky I am. Being able to make pretty good money, and get to do a lot of fun work, and at the same time I'm not besieged by photographers. — John C. Reilly

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

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

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

I know most of the photographers in Ireland. And if I don't want my photograph taken, they will leave me alone. — Saoirse Ronan

The main thing is to study pictures and stop listening to the pontifictaions of photographers. Photographers aren't oracles of wisdom. If they're good photographers, then take a good look at their pictures - what else do you need? — Elliott Erwitt

Some photographers could vomit on a piece of paper and call it art, you know ... Hang it in the Guggenheim, or whatever. Sell a print for two hundred pounds? But I can't do that. I just
Maybe I have too much respect for walls ... or something. — Pansy Schneider-Horst

Photography, too, reduces the world to strips and rectangles; photographers scrutinize the surfaces of reality in hope of unlocking the potential for significance that is latent within them. — Frank Gohlke

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

It's been a strange [summer] ... I was sent by a magazine to photograph famous photographers ... Of course, I included myself. — Weegee

I think there are two types of photographers, those who want to document the world and those who want to create their own world. I am more interested in documenting the world and presenting it to people with the question attached, 'Does this make any sense to you?' — Moby

A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they'll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won't do a thing for you if you don't have anything in your head or in your heart. — Arnold Newman

It's just a matter of who you are and how you talk to people. Your subjects will trust you only if you're confident about what you're doing. It really bothers me when photographers first approach a subject without a camera, try to establish a personal relationship, and only then get out their cameras. It's deceptive. I think you should just show up with a camera, to make your intentions clear. People will either accept you or they won't. — Mary Ellen Mark

As photographers, we have to find our own identity, our own voice, our own vocabulary. And my question all the time is whether this vocabulary is limited, like our own vocabulary that goes from A to Zed, or whether this vocabulary can carry on growing. And to me, I hope that it carries on growing. — Mario Testino

When photographers get beyond copying the achievements of others, or just repeating their own accidental first successes, they learn that they do not know where in the world they will find pictures. Nobody does. Each photograph that works is a revelation to its supposed creator. — Robert Adams

Magnum photographers were meant to go out as a crusade ... to places like famine and war and ... I went out and went round the corner to the local supermarket because this to me is the front line. — Martin Parr

The only times we are consciously aware of the authorship of a photograph, I would argue, are when we contemplate the photographs we ourselves have taken (or those of friends and family) or when we go deliberately to the photographers monograph or exhibition. The signed image - the appropriated, the owned image - is by far the rarest in this pullulating world of pictures. — William Boyd

I think this is the most exciting time in the history of photography. Technology is expanding what photographers can do, like the microscope and the telescope expanded what scientists could do. — Richard Misrach

Photographers can create moments that will never happen again but last a lifetime. — Tyler Shields

I started as a black-and-white teenage photographer, and I'm still there decades after. In some ways, the genre is almost gone. I am thinking of true, stubborn, lifetime black-and-white photographers, as opposed to black-and-white as a photographic commodity. — Hedi Slimane

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

Being a celebrity you always get really good seats to sporting events but you never get as good seats as the photographers get. And I really love sports. So one of the scams I have going now is I want to learn sports photography so I can get better seats at a sporting event. — Drew Carey

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

My advice for climbers or photographers is to really tune into your own passions and not just what other people are doing or aren't doing. Figure out what works for you, what turns you on, what gives you the greatest amount of energy and feeling of satisfaction. — Galen Rowell

I think that it was a great advantage to go into photography not knowing much about it. Not thinking. I think one of the problems with many photographers today is that they never see for themselves, but just like everybody else ... — Robert Mapplethorpe

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

Most photographers would feel a certain embarrassment in admitting publicly that they carried within them a sense of wonder, yet without it they would not produce the work they do, whatever their particular field. — Bill Brandt

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

If I am at a party, I want to be at the party. Too many photographers use the camera to avoid participating in things. They become professional observers. — Robert Mapplethorpe

These days I think the composers of music influence me more than any photographers or visual creators. I see something exciting or lovely and think to myself: 'If Papa Haydn or Wolfgang Amadeus or the red-headed Vivaldi were here with a camera, they'd snap a picture of what's in front of me.' So I take the picture for them. — Ralph Steiner

If you accept the idea that photographers, or some of them, are actually artists, then you have to look at their work less as a document of something than as a personal vision of the world. — Tod Papageorge