Photography Is My Life Quotes & Sayings

I've spent most of my life embracing violence in wars and revolutions. Even a famine is a form of violence. Because I photograph people in peril, people in pain, people being executed in front of me, I find it very difficult to get my head around the art narrative of photography. — Don McCullin

Light is my inspiration, my paint and brush. It is as vital as the model herself. Profoundly significant, it caresses the essential superlative curves and lines. Light I acknowledge as the energy upon which all life on this planet depends. — Ruth Bernhard

I'm a photographer, obviously. My chosen tool for understanding life, and communicating the results of this search to others, is the camera. — David Hurn

This is life. It is everywhere, and it is here for the taking. I am alive and I know this, now, in a more profound way than when I am doing anything else. These sights are ephemeral, fleeting treasures that have been offered to me and to me alone. No other person in the history of the world, anywhere in all of time and space, has been granted this gift to be here in my place. And I am privileged, through the camera, to take this moment away with me. That is why I photograph. — Bill Jay

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

Photography is a very important part of my life. — Conrad Hall

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

Of course, I won't be abandoning photography, because it is my life. — Sebastiao Salgado

I don't like the discussions about whether photography is an art. Even though I think that if it would be just a craft I would not have stayed with it all my life. — Josef Sudek

I can be an artist a posteriori, not a priori. If my pictures tell the story, our story, human story, then in a hundred years, then they can be considered an art reference, but now they are not made as art. I'm a journalist. My life's on the road, my studio is the planet. — Sebastiao Salgado

I think a lot of times when people have "creative blocks" and I know my share of friends do as well if they're at just some stuck point. They're not sure what to do with their lives or their writing or their photography or their filmmaking or whatever it is that they're doing. I think the best advice is you have to change your life up completely; to go on a trip, to go spend a year being of service. Be willing to take some major drastic action to get you out of your comfort zone and go inside, not outside. — Rainn Wilson

The one thing that is always clear in my mind is that the people, and their stories, and the themes of life that I photograph are always more important to me than the process of photography itself. — Peter Turnley

The greatest field of photography, for the literary interpretation of life, consists, to my mind, in its latent power to create, as it were, death for a single second. Any thing or person is, at will, made to die for a moment of time so immeasurably small that the return to life is effected without consciousness of the great adventure. (1928) — Pierre Mac Orlan

My way of photographing is my way of life. I photograph from my experience, my way of seeing things ... — Sebastiao Salgado

What is creativity? Having spent my life in one creative endeavor after another, I can tell you it's not something magical or mystical. It's something very simple. To me, it's just a moment - a moment where we look at the ordinary, but we see the extraordinary. It happens all the time in my photography. — Dewitt Jones

All of those thousands upon thousands of photographs my father had taken. Think of them instead. Each one a record, a testament, a bulwark against forgetting, against nothingness, against death. Look, this happened. A thing happened, and now it will never un happen. Here it is in a photograph: a baby putting its tiny hand in the wrinkled palm of an octogenarian. A fox running across a woodland path and a man raising a gun to shoot it. A plane crash. A comet smeared across a morning sky. A prime minister wiping his brow. The Beatles, sitting at a cafe table on the Champs-Elysees on a cold January day in 1964, John Lennon's pale face under the brim of a fisherman's cap. all these things happened, and my father committed them to a memory that wasn't just his own, but the world's. My father's life wasn't about disappearance. His was a life that worked against it. — Helen Macdonald

My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport. — Steve McCurry

This is my second paragliding photo book. Flying photography really drives my life, which is a never-ending search as every day, in every place, the light, atmosphere and elements are different.
This book is not about paragliders, their performance or technology; it's clearly about evocations and emotions. To me, the most important aspects of my life of flying adventures are the places and their perspectives, the situations and their contrasts, and the special people I shared special moments with. — Jerome Maupoint

Poetry at least in my own life, is really about your own mortality. Everything in poetry makes me think of my mortality. It is not a dark thing in life; it prepares you for the graceful things that happen in your life. It gives me a license to make any kind of picture I want with great courage. — Keith Carter

For me photography is just a way to collect material to realize the ideas in my mind. I get inspired by things around me in my daily life and all kinds of things I see. Every new project is a new challenge and my goal is to realize them as realistic as possible. — Erik Johansson

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

For me, the creation of a photograph is experienced as a heightened emotional response, most akin to poetry and music, each image the culmination of a compelling impulse I cannot deny. Whether working with a human figure or a still life, I am deeply aware of my spiritual connection with it. In my life, as in my work, I am motivated by a great yearning for balance and harmony beyond the realm of human experience, reaching for the essence of oneness with the Universe. — Ruth Bernhard

There's a time when people say your work is revolutionary, but you have to keep being revolutionary. I can't keep shooting pop stars all my life. You have to keep changing, keep pushing yourself, looking for the new, the unusual. — Rankin

My true program is summed up in one word: life. I expect to photograph anything suggested by that word which appeals to me. — Edward Weston

Seeing lesbian photography is just the tip of my radicalized clitoris. I have modeled for, commissioned, published, and fought for these pictures, and answered threats against them. I've seen the feminist movement bring these pictures to life, and I've seen that same movement try to suppress the liberating results. — Susie Bright

I tell a little bit of my life to them, and they tell a little of theirs to me. The picture itself is just the tip of the iceberg. — Sebastiao Salgado

! 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

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 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

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

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

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