Quotes & Sayings About Photography Life

Photography seems to fix, but this is an illusion created by our short lives. A photograph is merely a note held for 200 years. — Douglas McCulloh

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

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

Modern photography must do more than entertain, it must incite thought and by its clear statements of actuality, cultivate a sympathetic understanding of men and women and the life they live and create. — Max Dupain

I was drawn to street photography because there are pictures everywhere there: a woman holding a dog, a baby screaming to be put in a pram, kids playing punch ball, stores with huge barrels of kosher pickles outside. I wanted to photograph life, and here it was. — Harold Feinstein

'Woman on the Plaza,' with its distinct horizon, snow-like surfaces, wintry wall, stunning sunlight, sharp shadows, and hurrying figure, would become the most biographical of my photographs - an abstract image of the landscape and life of northern Ohio where I grew up and first practiced photography. — Sam Abell

After my kids were born I found myself incorporating my photography into different art endeavors and from there it just blossomed. I have always had to have an outlet for my creativity and when my life became more about raising my family than the bright lights of show business exploring my photo art was a great outlet for me. — Angela Cartwright

As in any person's life, there have been difficult moments: I have a son with Down's syndrome; through my photography, I have witnessed all manner of human degradation. But there have also been very happy moments. — Sebastiao Salgado

Look for the extraordinary in the ordinary. — Matthew Knisely

In the act of love, as in photography, there is a form of life and a kind of slow death, — Nobuyoshi Araki

[Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this 'me' which like knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features 'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography. — Roland Barthes

By shooting the darkest areas three zones lighter, you turned a black, lifeless max black zone 0 into a zone 3.
I think, in life, most of us did this all the time. — A.S. King

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

I believe that photography loves banal objects, and I love the life of objects. — Josef Sudek

Because I know war ... because I know the horror, I don't want to add to it ... After the war, we felt the need to celebrate life, and for me photography was the means to achieve this ... — Edouard Boubat

Life is like photography. You need the negatives to develop. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good. — Wallace Stevens

He nods, looking through the pictures on the screen on the back of his camera. Some relationships can only exist as memories. But unlike ephemeral digital images that can be sorted and deleted, we can't erase the past. We have to learn to live with all the images that are stored in love's archive, memories tagged good and bad. No Photoshopping. Accept the negative before moving forward. — Shannon Mullen

Those static images have the uncanny ability to jar the memory and bring places and people back to life. They bridge the present with the past and validate as real what the passage of time has turned into hazy recollections. Were it not for them, my experiences would have remained as just imperfect memories of perfect moments. — Isabel Lopez

Photography does deal with 'truth' or a kind of superficial reality better than any of the other arts, but it never questions the nature of reality - it simply reproduces reality. And what good is that when the things of real value in life are invisible? — Duane Michals

The effort of painting from life has cost my models a great deal of physical discomfort, and cost me a great deal of money in model fees ... I have wanted to make the camera obsolete ... because, in my reading about early 20th century art, I found that the most frequently used argument made in favor of abstraction was that the camera made realist painting obsolete. — Philip Pearlstein

Through photography and image I have been afforded the privilege of sharing the stories and myths of people's lives with others. The process for me became self-revelatory. It was a process of soul-making, something all humans are engaged in, no matter their endeavor. I saw a part of myself in each person I photographed. I came to realize, through the alchemical process of living, that each life is important, no matter how little that life seems to offer. — J. Don Cook

No amount of photography could replace the memories of a life lived, of lives observed and known, of lives elaborated in the mind and on the page. — M.G. Vassanji

Photography is an adventure just as life is an adventure. If man wishes to express himself photographically, he must understand, surely to a certain extent, his relationship to life. — Harry Callahan

I get so confused about life photography art. — William Wegman

One day I was speculating on how I would like to look back on life and I decided I wanted to feel that I was a photographer rather than a teacher. As simple as that. — David Hurn

I'm not against digital photography. It's great for newspapers. And there are photographers doing great work digitally. When they use Photoshop as a darkroom tool, that's fine, too. But at this point of my life, after so many years, I don't really want to change, and I still love film. — Mary Ellen Mark

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

A self-help story about a man who overcomes circumstance by reminiscing over his own life's lessons. Inspired, he sets out at night on the gritty streets of New York City to capture the beauty of life thru his passion for photography. — Amazon

Madonna is her own Hollywood studio - a popelike mogul and divine superstar in one. She has a laserlike instinct for publicity, aided by her visual genius for still photography (which none of her legion of imitators has). Unfortunately, her public life has dissolved into a series of staged photo ops. — Camille Paglia

Photography, for me, is a lot like web surfing in real life. — Alec Soth

Photography is inextricably linked with life; the photographer is not invisibly behind the camera but projecting a life-attitude through the lens to create an interference pattern with the image. Who he is, what he believes, not only becomes important to know intellectually, but also becomes revealed emotionally and visibly through a body of work. — Bill Jay

One of the things that I most believe in is the compose and wait philosophy of photography. It's a very satisfying, almost spiritual way to photograph. Life isn't' knocking you around, life isn't controlling you. You have picked your place, you've picked your scene, you've picked your light, you've done all the decision making and you are waiting for the moment to come to you. — Sam Abell

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

Looking into the mirror I ask myself:
"You live in a house equipped with air conditioning.
You eat tasty food.
You utilize convenient transportation to travel.
You utilize convenient information technology to live.
Could you not say that you, who do all this, are not a dictator?
Isn't it right that you life is supported by somebody else's death?
Doesn't your life that exists at the expense of somebody else's sacrifice infinitely resemble the life of a dictator who only cares about his own life?"
-Yasumasa Morimura (excerpt from "Mr. Morimura's Dictator Speech"). — Marinella Venanzi

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

You are lucky if you have one or two epiphanies in your life, particularly a creative one. — Keith Carter

Truthfully, I don't really think of myself as a photographer. I don't have all the disciplines and knowledge of a person who's spent their life devoted to photography. — Patti Smith

Working from photos makes you a little more analytical, a little more cerebral, because you're less connected to the intensity of life. — George L. Carlson

My interest in photography did not begin with books or mentors, or with any burning desire to see the world through a camera. It evolved from an intense devotion to mountains and wilderness that eventually shaped all the parts of my life and brought them together. — Galen Rowell

Only photography has been able to divide human life
into a series of moments, each of them has the value of a complete existence. — Eadweard Muybridge

Sometimes, without effort, you live in the moment. You don't regret the past or worry about the future, and in that moment everything flashes before your eyes , a clear snapshot of what has to be done, and everything pauses. — Rebecca McNutt

Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.
Photographs are. — Susan Sontag

Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing. — Susan Sontag

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

If all your life means to you is water running over rocks, then photograph it, but I want to create something that would not have existed without me. — Minor White

Photography is only a new road from a different direction, but moving toward the common goal, which is life. — Paul Strand

First rule to be a photographer, you have to be invisible. — Sameh Talhamy

If I am lucky, something new and inexplicable often appears in front of my lens. I am always surprised by the mystery of how my best images appear. That excitement and shock of discovery makes my life at these moments a gift. — Joyce Tenneson

Did I express my personality? I think that's quite unimportant because it's not people's selves but what they have to say about life that's important. — Paul Strand

When you're shy, a camera becomes an entry into life. It was a kind of shield I could hide my shyness behind, and it allowed me to become an active observer rather than a passive one. — Lynn Johnston

These days it seems that physical truth can easily be rearranged, rethought, or re-created outright. Any image can be made pristine, all the warts can be removed. But returning to the source of a thing - the real source - means the photographer has to watch, dig, listen for voices, sniff the smells, and have many doubts. My life in photography has been lived as a skeptic. — Jerome Liebling

The work of the artist is not so much what you say or what you know, it's recognizing what you know. That's what life is about. That's what photography is about. You see something, or you hear someone say something, and you say That is a truth. You know, deep in you. That's when you start shooting. — Sylvia Plachy

A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you. — Brigitte Bardot

Photography is like life What does it all mean? I don't know - but you get an impression, a feeling. An impression of walking through the street, walking through the park, walking through life. I'm very suspicious of people who say they know what it means. — Leonard Freed

Every crime scene is a piece of a sprawling man-made puzzle. Each one begins with a tragic death that leads to heartbreak, tumbles into forgiveness, sparks anger, fuels fear and triggers a vast array of other emotions that sometimes lead to additional chaos and heart-rending calamity. So it's not enough to take a picture of a crime scene that showcases a couple of crime lab technicians laying out evidence markers around a body, not when there is so much more that surrounds the darkest moments of life. — Maggie Ybarra

In life you can be dealt a winning hand of cards and you can find a way to lose, and you can be dealt a losing hand and find a way to win. True in art and true in life: you pretty much make your own destiny. If you are by nature an optimistic person, which I am, that puts you in a better position to be lucky in life. — Chuck Close

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

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

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

Throughout the history of art it has been art itself - in all its forms - that has inspired art ... today's photographs are so geared to life that one can learn more from them than from life itself. — Van Deren Coke

My whole artistic life has been devoted to battling myself and my ability to externalize my deepest emotions. As I have gotten older, the work has become more direct, perhaps reflecting the fact that for the first time in my life I feel really free. I have been fascinated with wings all my life. I have had an obsession with transcendence, the need to push forward and metaphorically fly. — Joyce Tenneson

[Documentary photography] is unwittingly literary, because it is nothing other than an observation of contemporary life apprehended at the right moment by an artist capable of seizing it. (1928) — Pierre Mac Orlan

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

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

The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh. — Edward Weston

In taking that photograph, I understood something I will never forget: how I wished to arrest all the beauty that came before me. Not the classical beauty of symmetry and exact proportions or the fancy of fashion, which is ever-changing with the seasons, but the beauty of a soul, that inner life that reveals itself so seldom, just for an instant, and only if you look closely and learn to see with an open heart. — Elizabeth Ross

Photography has always been associated with death. Reality is colorful, yet early photography always took the color out of reality and made it black-and-white. Color is life; black-and-white is death. There was a ghost hidden in the invention of photography. — Nobuyoshi Araki

A photograph has picked up a fact of life, and that fact will live forever. — Raghu Rai

Photography in our time leaves us with a grave responsibility. While we are playing in our studios with broken flowerpots, oranges, nude studies and still lifes, one day we know that we will be brought to account: life is passing before our eyes without our ever having seen a thing. — Brassai

In a world and a life that moves so fast, photography just makes the sound go out and it makes you stop and take a pause. Photography calms me. — Drew Barrymore

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

There is not a big difference between life and taking pictures ... You're in the middle of life, you're living, making love, eating, sleeping - and photography is part of it. And I don't say this because I'm being romantic. I say this because that's just the way it happens to be. — Anders Petersen

Essentially what photography is is life lit up. — Sam Abell

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

To me, the work I do is a means of interpreting unsettling truths, of bearing witness, and of sounding an alarm. The beauty of formal representation both carries an affirmation of life and subversively brings us face to face with news from our besieged world. — Richard Misrach

Do not settle for easy. Do not settle for that first image. Craft it, work it, and make something more out of it. And finally, don't forget that the biggest joy in photography is making pictures of those things in your own life. — David Burnett

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

Starting a new chapter is much like composing the perfect photograph. You must ensure the proper components are there. You may throw out the extra, but with out the key elements the story goes untold. — Faith Tilley Johnson

The way that light hits objects in life, three-dimensional objects before you photograph them, is really the story of photography. — Rashid Johnson

As long as we're alive and interacting with life, the world, and the people around us, we'll have something to say. — David DuChemin

John Loengard, the picture editor at Life, always used to tell me, If you want something to look interesting, don't light all of it. — Joe McNally

Photography is about savoring life at 1/100th of a second. — Marc Riboud

I think there's a deep impulse in most humans to do creative stuff, whether that's music or art, photography or writing. Most people at some point in their life say they want to do something creative - they want to be an actor, a director, a writer, a poet, a painter or whatever. — Stewart Butterfield

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

I am just a middle-class farm boy from Dodge City and my grandparents were wheat farmers. I thought painting, acting, directing and photography were all part of being an artist. I have made my money that way. And I have had some fun. It's not been a bad life. — Dennis Hopper

When a person looks at a photograph you've taken, they will always think of themselves, their own life experience. They will relate your photograph to their memories. That interplay is where a picture comes alive and grows into something. They function like invitations. — Jason Fulford

I was extremely irritated being photographed for a long time, then I gave up caring. Photography is a nauseating cliche, but there is a lot to it. You can tell so much about a person from it. You are exaggerating the consciousness. It's life-thickening, photography. — Peter Beard

! 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

Photography is the typical means of expression of a society founded on a civilization of technicians, conscious of the aims it has set for itself ... Its power of exactly reproducing external reality, a power inherent in its technique, lends it a documentary character and makes it appear as the most faithful and impartial process for the reproduction of social life. — Gisele Freund

Lifes light. Life is light. You can make light do anything you want to. Photography means 'light writing'. — L. Ron Hubbard

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

We can all take pictures but not everyone can capture the beauty that's usually hidden in plain view ...
We can all open our mouth to sing but not everyone can melodically touch your soul ...
We can all pick up a pen to write but not everyone can write words in such a way that they leap off of the page for you ...
We can all part our lips to speak but not everyone can speak life into you ...
We can all move our bodies to a beat but not everyone can become one with music, stir emotions and shift energy with dance ...
Point is: WE CAN all do something but Know your gifts, cultivate them and ALWAYS, ALWAYS BE YOURSELF! Then working together becomes effortless. Copies aren't accepted everywhere ... ORIGINALS are eventually required! — Sanjo Jendayi

Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death. — John Berger

There was a time in my life that I may not have been that nice, and now I'm in a position to contribute to the education of young people, and teach them to be compassionate, be more loving, more caring, to not use profanity, to not pollute the environment - these are things that I address in my photography. I — Jamel Shabazz

A photograph is just a little, teeny-weeny, small piece of life. I feel like I see so much more than what I can actually get. — Annie Leibovitz

Photography has saved my life, over and over again. — Laurel Nakadate

Photography was the only thing that mattered in my life and I gave it everything. — Anton Corbijn

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

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