Quotes & Sayings About Photographing

As a kid, I used to dream about airplanes before I ever flew in one. I really knew, when I started photographing, I wanted it to be a way of knowing different cultures, not just in other countries but in this country, too, and I knew I wanted to enter other lives. I knew I wanted to be a voyeur. — Mary Ellen Mark

I've been working with the land for most of my life; walking it and photographing it. And I love it to bits. — Fay Godwin

The more you do, the more you realize there is to do, what a vast object the metropolis is, and how the work of photographing could go on forever. — Berenice Abbott

Maybe I had to stop photographing so that I could learn to touch. — Vito Acconci

You were the thing
worth photographing,
the stillness
that begged
for a matte finish
and far off stare. — Tyler Knott Gregson

I could spend my whole life photographing circuses. They combine everything I'm interested in - they're ironic, poetic, and corny at the same time. There's also something about a circus that's magical, sentimental, and almost tragic, like a Fellini film. — Mary Ellen Mark

I've seen my own blood and broken a few bones. I've been hit, which isn't an entirely bad thing, as at least you have a glimpse of the suffering endured by the people you are photographing. And in a sense, crumbling empires and war have been with me all my life. — Don McCullin

At some point during my travels, I had a slight change of focus which would end up defining the rest of my career. I began taking pictures of people. In addition to all the buildings, street signs and fire hydrants, I started photographing some of the interesting humans that passed by me on the street. — Brandon Stanton

When I photograph, I do not think much. If you looked at my contacts you would ask yourself: "What is this guy doing?" But I keep working with my contacts and with my prints, I look at them all the time. I believe that the result of this work stays in me and at the moment of photographing it comes out, without my thinking of it. — Josef Koudelka

Ultimately success or failure in photographing people depends on the photographer's ability to understand his fellow man. — Edward Weston

I think the best pictures are often on the edges of any situation, I don't find photographing the situation nearly as interesting as photographing the edges. — William Albert Allard

The tools I learned photographing celebrities, now I want to use them to sell ideas. — David LaChapelle

It is the photographing of ordinary things, in extraordinary light, that produces extraordinary photographs. — David Young

What I have tried to do is involve the people I was photographing ... if they were willing to give, I was willing to photograph. — Eve Arnold

Photography of any living being, according to Taliban rule, was illegal. So when I went to Afghanistan, immediately I was worried about photographing people. But it was what I wanted: to show what life was like under the Taliban, specifically for women. — Lynsey Addario

The interviews have gotten much longer with 'Humans of New York.' When I was first starting, I was just photographing people. And then I went to just kind of including a quote or two. Now when I'm approaching somebody on the street, I'm spending about 30 to 45 minutes with them often. — Brandon Stanton

I've played in bands myself, and sat on the floor photographing some of the greatest bands in the world while they rehearse. What's always struck me is how different the sensory, especially auditory, experience is when you're in the middle of the music with the musicians playing off each other around you. — Chris Milk

Photography has a relation to intervention, but photographing is not the same as an intervening. — Judith Butler

Photographing is an emotional thing, a graceful thing. Photography allows me to wander with a purpose. — Leonard Freed

I started photographing myself, and found that I could see portions of myself that I had never seen before. Since I face just my face in the mirror, I know pretty much what it's like. When I see a side-view I'm not used to it, and find it peculiar ... So, photographing myself and discovering unknown territories of my surface self causes an interesting psychological confrontation. — Lucas Samaras

I just love photographing. I don't do it for anyone else. — Kim Weston

People think photography is about photographing. To me, it's about relationships. — Lynsey Addario

I just think it's important to be direct and honest with people about why you're photographing them and what you're doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul. — Mary Ellen Mark

A woman said to me when she first sat down, You're photographing the wrong side of my face. I said, Oh, is there one? — Imogen Cunningham

Americans. They came right out with things. Hitchens family lore related the tale of how once, when I was but a toddler, my parents were passing with me through an airport and ran into some Yanks. 'Real cute kid,' said these big and brash people without troubling to make a formal introduction. They insisted on photographing me and, before breaking off to resume their American lives, pressed into my dimpled fist a signed dollar bill in token of my cuteness. This story was often told (I expect that Yvonne and the Commander had been to an airport together perhaps three times in their lives) and always with a note of condescension. That was Americans for you: wanting to be friendly all right, but so loud, and inclined to flash the cash. — Christopher Hitchens

Often people ask what I'm photographing, which is a hard question to answer. And the best what I've come up with is I just say: Life today. — William Eggleston

I've always been interested in photographing traditions and customs - especially in America. The prom is an American tradition, a rite of passage that has always been one of the most important rituals of American youth. It is a day in our lives that we never forget - a day full of hopes and dreams for our future. — Mary Ellen Mark

I wrote poetry from the time I could write. That was the only way I could begin to express who I was but the poems didn't make sense to my teachers. They didn't rhyme. They were about the wind sounds, the planets' motions, never about who I was or how I felt. I didn't think I felt anything. I was this mind more than a body or a heart. My mind photographing the stars, hearing the wind. — Francesca Lia Block

To me, that is the essence of me as a photographer. It is those ideas, working with them, formulating them and eventually putting them down on paper, photographing them and then going on to the next step. — Kim Weston

Photographing plants makes you look carefully and become aware of the many solutions plants provide to human problems — Andrea Jones

Photographing a cake can be art. — Irving Penn

The Bahamas has mangrove nurseries, coral reefs, shallow sea grass beds, and deep oceanic trenches - all perfect ecosystems for sharks. Photographing multiple shark species in exquisite water was the assignment I had dreamed about from the start. — Brian Skerry

Having exhausted every possibility at the moment when he was coming full circle, Antonino realised that photographing photographs was the only course that he had left - or, rather, the true course he had obscurely been seeking all this time. (Last line of the story The Adventure of a Photographer ) — Italo Calvino

I started photographing men in 1964. Fourteen years later I got a Guggenheim, even so no one would publish the male nudes. — Judy Dater

Photographers tend not to photograph what they can't see, which is the very reason one should try to attempt it. Otherwise we're going to go on forever just photographing more faces and more rooms and more places. Photography has to transcend description. It has to go beyond description to bring insight into the subject, or reveal the subject, not as it looks, but how does it feel? — Duane Michals

We all look in the mirror and see us a little blonder or a little thinner or a little younger, whatever that ideal might be and most of the people that I'm photographing are selling something, you know whether they're on the front of an album cover or a magazine or they're a corporate person ready to switch companies or a doctor selling a skincare line ... so I want to help them achieve that. — Carol Friedman

Two middle-aged American couples came back from the dining car and, as soon as they could see Mt. Fuji, past Numazu, stood at the windows eagerly taking photographs. By the time Fuji was completely visible, down to the fields at its base, they seemed tired of photographing and had turned their backs to it. The — Yasunari Kawabata

The relationship I have with my mother now, and photographing her in front of the grave, it opens up discussions, and dealings with the conversations with my mother about, when I was little, how we lived and about suicide and talking about it, so it's something positive, it brought us more together, because people might never discuss that. Some families never go near certain subjects because it's too hurtful or too close or too dangerous. But within doing these photographs, I also wanted to open up a conversation with her about certain things about life. — Jurgen Teller

My wife Ann and I had been digging during the day, transplanting lilies from the front of this abandoned farmhouse back down the road to where we live. We finished. She was tired and laid in the grass. I took a picture. The house is now gone. The walnut trees have been bulldozed and burned. I saw this picture the other day for the first time in years and realized how photographing life within a hundred yards of my front porch had helped me focus on everything I cared about. — Larry Towell

For me, film-making is combining images and sounds of real things in an order that makes them effective. What I disapprove of is photographing things that are not real. Sets and actors are not real. — Robert Bresson

I used to have a theory about photographing. It was a sense of getting in between two actions, or in between acton and repose. — Diane Arbus

There's always been something illicit about the way I work. I'm photographing people I don't know, when nobody else is home - there's a necessary degree of secrecy. — Katy Grannan

One night I had an idea while I was at the movies: to photograph the film itself. I tried to imagine photographing an entire feature film with my camera. I could already picture the projection screen making itself visible as a white rectangle. In my imagination, this would appear as a glowing, white rectangle; it would come forward from the projection surface and illuminate the entire theater. This idea struck me as being very interesting, mysterious, and even religious. — Hiroshi Sugimoto

And I was very successful at baby photography ... Strange isn't it? Because some of my portraits of babies were - I used dramatic lighting, shadow lighting, and I didn't use flash. We didn't have flash in those days, we just had floodlights, and I was photographing babies as I would an object - an inanimate object, for that matter. — Julius Shulman

Photographing attractive people who were doing attractive things in attractive places. (Summary of his photographic career) — Slim Aarons

If I stage things too much and nothing changes in the act of photographing, then I might as well have not taken the picture: If the whole thing already exists in my head, then I haven't learned anything. The tension lies between the staging and the unpredictability. — Justine Kurland

Oddly, I'd been to most of the locations where I started photographing slavery many times before. I even considered some of them homes-away-from-home. But there can be dark corners in familiar places. — Lisa Kristine

When you work fast, what you put in your pictures is what your brought with yoiu - your own ideas and concepts. When you spend more time on a project, you learn to understand your subjects. There comes a time when it is not you who is taking the pictures. Something special happens between the photographer and the people he is photographing. He realizes that they are giving the pictures to him. — Sebastiao Salgado

Childhood has been idealised as a lost garden paradise to which we can never return. We are excluded from this world of carelessness, innocence and unity. But the imaginary kingdom is nothing more than a projection of adult ideas and concerns onto the image, an expression of our own yearnings. By photographing children alone, divorced from any social setting, I allow them to exist on their own ... I am exploring the equivocal connection between self and world. — Loretta Lux

I don't want someone photographing my cellulite - I can't take it! — Shania Twain

For me, every photograph is a portrait; the clothes are just a vehicle for what I want to say. You're photographing a relationship with the person you're shooting; there's an exchange, and that's what that picture is. — Peter Lindbergh

I don't believe a person has a style. What people have is a way of photographing what is inside them. What is there comes out. — Sebastiao Salgado

Born Berlin 1931, Germany, father a British diplomat, mother an American artist. Educated at various schools all over the world. 1958 Settled down to live in London. 1966 Became interested in photography through photographing my young children. No formal training. — Fay Godwin

I like photographing the people I love, the people I admire, the famous, and especially the infamous. My last infamous subject was the extreme right wing French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen. — Helmut Newton

I got a job in the tear-sheets department, ripping up magazines like People, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and Time, and delivering the editorial pages ... So I began to use a camera to make fake photographs of the ads. By re-photographing a magazine page and then developing the film in a cheap lab, the photos came out very strange. — Richard Prince

At age 12 I had an obsession with Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and then proceeded to watch all the other Kubrick films I could including a doc called Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures in which it was revealed to me that he started as a photographer ... I got a camera sometime shortly after, but spent many years just photographing flowers in my neighborhood. — Anton Yelchin

When you start photographing yourself, you are going to be amazed at all the things you find out about yourself, and you'll be glad you did. — Bunny Yeager

The trouble with photographing beautiful women is that you never get into the dark room until after they've gone. — Yousuf Karsh

I had taken the photograph from afar (distance being the basic glitch in our relationship), using my Nikon and zoom lens while hiding behind a fake marble pillar. I was hiding because if he knew I'd been secretly photographing him for all these months he would think I was immature, neurotic and obsessive.
I'm not.
I'm an artist.
Artists are always misunderstood.(Thwonk) — Joan Bauer

I started writing and photographing for different publications and finally ended up being the correspondent in South Asia, for the Geneva-based Journal de Geneve, which at one time used to be one of the best international newspapers in Europe. — Francois Gautier

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

Photographing these flowers has made me see the world differently. It was as if I had lifted a secret veil from a subject I had loved and appreciated my whole life. I offer these photographs with the hope that they will open a new visual or meditative universe for you as well. — Joyce Tenneson

Whats up, Q?" asked Gus.
Oh, we're just scattering some dead fish about town, breaking some windows, photographing naked guys, hanging out in skyscraper lobbies at three-fifteen in the morning, that type of thing.
"Not much," I answered. — John Green

I never knew [Alfred Stieglitz] to make a trip anywhere to photograph. His eye was in him, and he used it on anything that was nearby. Maybe that way he was always photographing himself. — Georgia O'Keeffe

To photograph people is to obligate them in some way to face things they weren't expecting to. — Susana Fortes

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

If you're really in the process of photographing, you are absolutely aware. You are looking. — Jessica Lange

Old Prague was a story-book city caked in grime: ancient, soot-blackened. History lived in every detail: in the deerstalker rooftops and the blue-sparking trams. He wandered the streets in disbelief, photographing everything, images from Kafka crowding into his head. With the turn of every corner it came back to him: the special frisson you get behind enemy lines. — Philip Sington

When you're photographing anything to do with war and conflict you're photographing something impossible. Everything you do is just clumsy and stupid and half witted. Because it is impossible to portray the full width and breadth of everything that you are up against. — Simon Norfolk

I try not to let the material aspects of different cultures distract me from getting to the essence of the person I'm photographing. Whether it's a man or a woman. Wherever they're from, I try not to let social status or cultural background affect me or affect the person. I strip all those things away to get down to the essence of the human being, the person. — Mario Sorrenti

We seem to know when to 'tap the heart.' Others have hit the intellect. We can hit them in all emotional way. Those who appeal to the intellect only appeal to a very limited group. The real thing behind this is: we are in the motion picture business, only we are drawing them instead of photographing them. — Walt Disney

I know now that before I take a picture I have to be sure about how I feel about the subjects. What I don't know is if I should explain to them what I'm doing while I'm photographing them ... — Tina Barney

Just as long as it pays enough to give me the option to go back to work part-time if I decide to pursue my hobby professionally, which is photographing cool manicures for Instagram. — Mindy Kaling

I think I misunderstood Instagram and just thought it was people photographing their friends, and discovered there were a number of people, a number of artists, who were taking it very seriously and doing very imaginative work with Instagram as the medium. — Stephen Shore

My way in for photographing people is really their work. I'm always interested in what people make, and then I photograph the person. Sometimes the person is a disappointment. But that's the risk. It informs me a lot about the character of a person if I know their work first. — Anton Corbijn

I think for me, what I'm doing on set is I'm watching things happen as an audience member and trying to just look at, what's the image we're photographing, how will that advance the story and what will the next image be. — Christopher Nolan

I think when you're photographing - when anybody's photographing another person in a private situation, it's a kind of a seduction but it's not always a sexual seduction ... I feel like when Jack [Welpott] was doing it, it was a sexual seduction and when I was doing it, it was more of a psychological seduction in order to get them to cooperate with me ... Not because I wanted them to spread their legs or ... be, you know, Wanna sleep with me? , or whatever. — Judy Dater

I was flying planes before I was driving cars. I started gliding when I was fourteen, about when I started photographing. I was a geeky kid, and the camera was a way in high school for me to have some power. Flying was, too, I guess. — Michael Light

I like taking photographs, because I like life. And I like photographing people best of all, because most of all I love humanity. — Horst P. Horst

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

I wasn't interested in just photographing someone naked, I was interested in representing them as clothed in their own skin, secure in themselves. — Mona Kuhn

It wasn't even a matter of what I was photographing, as what had happened to me in the process. When I discovered that I could look at the horror of Belsen
4000 dead and starving lying around
and think only of a nice photographic composition, I knew something had happened to me and I had to stop. I felt I was like the people running the camp
it didn't mean a thing. — George Rodger

Photographing a culture in the here and now often means photographing the intersection of the present with the past. — David DuChemin

I didn't react visually. This girl came up and knelt over the body and let out a God-awful scream that made me click the camera. (On photographing Mary Vecchio with slain student Jeffery Miller during the shootings of students at Kent State, April, 1970.) — John Filo

If you are bored with your own photography you are really bored with what you are photographing, so pick a new subject about which you are knowledgeable and enthusiastic. — Bill Jay

It quickly came to be that I grew interested in photographing whatever was there wherever I happened to be. For any reason. — William Eggleston

I'm photographing all the time. I'm such a visual person and I don't want to miss that moment. — Danny Clinch

Snapshots that have been taken of me working show something I was not aware of at all, that over and over again I'm holding my own body or my own hands exactly like the person I'm photographing. I never knew I did that, and obviously what I'm doing is trying to feel, actually physically feel, the way he or she feels at the moment I'm photographing them in order to deepen the sense of connection. — Richard Avedon

More than anything, he taught me the art of patience. Cameras introduce tension. People are aware of the power of a camera, and this instinctively makes most subjects uncomfortable and stiff. But Bebeto taught me to linger in a place long enough, without photographing, so that people grew comfortable with me and the camera's presence. — Lynsey Addario

I'm as interested in photographing the film crew as much as the actors and actresses. — Paul Walker

...read 1984 when it came out in 1949, and found its account of the 'memory hole' peculiarly evocative and frightening, for it accorded with my own doubts about my memory. I think that reading this led to an increase in my own journal keeping, and photographing, and an increased need to look at testimonies of the past — Oliver Sacks

I have been photographing our toilet, that glossy enameled receptacle of extraordinary beauty. Here was every sensuous curve of the human figure divine but minus the imperfections. Never did the Greeks reach a more significant consummation to their culture, and it somehow reminded me, in the glory of its chaste convulsions and in its swelling, sweeping, forward movement of finely progressing contours, of the Victory of Samothrace. — Edward Weston

I never notice a difference between photographing a man and a woman; for me, it's just somebody. — Mario Testino

Over the years, I have perfected the art of dancing and photographing at the same time: it's a great double act. If you're dancing, you are joining in. If you stand there rigid, you are not in the flow of things. — Martin Parr

There are many images which I miss on purpose. I've done too many of them before and photographing them again doesn't change the world, or me. — Jim Goldberg

I've always been fascinated by twins. In my forty years of photographing, whenever there was an opportunity, I would take a picture of twins. I found the notion that two people could appear to look exactly alike very compelling. — Mary Ellen Mark

I'm always mentally photographing everything as practice. — Minor White

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

I have to shoot three cassettes of film a day, even when not 'photographing', in order to keep the eye in practice. — Josef Koudelka

I just happened to have my camera and be photographing my friends. It was totally innocent; there was no purpose to the photographs. There was a purity to them that wasn't planned; it was realism. — Larry Clark