Photography Is Magic Quotes & Sayings

Black and white photography is truly quite a 'departure from reality', and the transition from one aspect of visual magic to another was not as complete as many imagine. — Ansel Adams

"It is light that reveals, light that obscures, light that communicates. It is light I "listen" to. The light late in the day has a distinct quality, as it fades toward the darkness of evening. After sunset there is a gentle leaving of the light, the air begins to still, and a quiet descends. I see magic in the quiet light of dusk. I feel quiet, yet intense energy in the natural elements of our habitat. A sense of magic prevails. A sense of mystery. It is a time for contemplation, for listening - a time for making photographs. " — John Sexton

I think there is an element of magic in photography - light, chemistry, precious metals - a certain alchemy. You can wield a camera like a magic wand almost. Murmur the right words and you can conjure up proof of a dream. I believe in wonder. I look for it in my life every day; I find it in the most ordinary things. — Keith Carter

The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art. — Roland Barthes

I don't want to sound mystical but sometimes when you take a picture - when the sets are in place - then something takes over and leads you. It's this sense of extraordinary luck and chance. The shoot is blessed and charmed, and you make pictures that you couldn't in your wildest dreams have imagined. That is the magic of photography. — Tim Walker

The very best gift ... is that anyone can experience those unexpected twinkles of joy that make a magical moment. At these moments, you feel true, deep joy because of a great new insight, a beautiful prospect, or a glimpse into the radiance of another soul. They are the magic moments when life seems better than you ever realized. — Richard M. Eyre

I was a Catholic boy, I went to church every Sunday. A church has a certain magic and mystery for a child. It still shows in how I arrange things. It's always little altars. — Robert Mapplethorpe

You think too much and I bet it kills the magic," he says simply. "Some things are just instinct and if you try and replace that with thinking they die. You can read and think as much as you want before and after, but in the moment, man, you have to, like, let go. — Blue GhostGhost

He took twelve pictures that day.
Within a few days he showed me the contact sheet. "This one has the magic," he said.
When I look at it now, I never see me. I see us. — Patti Smith

To me, the magic of photography, per se, is that you can capture an instant of a second that couldn't exist before and couldn't exist after. It's almost like a cowboy that draws his gun. You draw a second before or after, you miss and you're dead - not them. To me, photography's always like that. — Mario Testino

A kind of golden hour one remembers for a life time ... Everything was touched with magic. — Margaret Bourke-White

At this sunset hour, the canyon walls are indescribably beautiful and I fear the magic of photography can never record what I see now. The tall spires near the canyon's top and the walls of the canyon up there look as if God had reached out and swiped a brush of golden paint across them, gilding these rocks in the bright glow of the setting sun. — Barry Goldwater

The most refined skills of color printing, the intricate techniques of wide-angle photography, provide us pictures of trivia bigger and more real than life. We forget that we see trivia and notice only that the reproduction is so good. Man fulfils his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera - and himself. — Daniel J. Boorstin

Photography is a great adventure in thinking and looking, a wonderful magic toy that miraculously manages to combine our adult awareness with the fairy-tale world of childhood, a never-ending journey through great and small, through variations and the realm of illusions and appearances, a labyrinthine and specular place of multitudes and simulation. — Luigi Ghirri

You can't make a great musician or a great photographer if the magic isn't there. — Eve Arnold

Photography is a magic thing. A thing that has mysterious odors, a little strange and frightening, something one quickly grows to love. — Jacques-Henri Lartigue

Photography has saturated us as spectators from its inception amidst a mingling of laboratorial pursuits and magic acts to its current status as propagator of convention, cultural commodity, and global hobby. — Barbara Kruger

Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. — Susan Sontag

Photography is a craft. Anyone can learn a craft with normal intelligence and application. To take it beyond the craft is something else. That's when magic comes in. And I don't know that there's any explanation for that. — Elliott Erwitt

For me the printing process is part of the magic of photography. It's that magic that can be exciting, disappointing, rewarding and frustrating all in the same few moments in the darkroom. — John Sexton

That was why, later on, he began to lose interest in photography: first when colour took over, then when it became plain that the old magic of light-sensitive emulsions was waning, that to the rising generation the enchantment lay in a techne of images without substance, images that could flash through the ether without residing anywhere, that could be sucked into a machine and emerge from it doctored, untrue. He gave up recording the world in photographs then, and transferred his energies to saving the past. — J.M. Coetzee

Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning. — Julian Barnes

Film photography will always be superior to digital - because no matter how many lasers and instant buttons and HD pixels you've got, a human being can take a photograph with much more integrity and meaning than one a built-in robot took. — Rebecca McNutt

The magic possibility of framing a certain space and time is what brought me to photography. This process of recording elements of 3 dimensions in the flow of time, and fixing them in a 2 dimensional image, creates a new context for the elements of the photograph ... — Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

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