Quotes & Sayings About Photography Nature

It is just as important to bring people the evidence of the beauty of the world of nature and of man as it is to give them a document of ugliness, squalor, and despair. — Ansel Adams

We may never know what another person is thinking--never truly get into anyone else's head--but photography brings us as close as anything can. When the members of an audience at an art gallery look at a picture, they can step for a moment inside the mind of the artist. Like telepathy. Like time travel. At some future date, when people gaze at my photographs of the islands, they will see what I saw. They will stand where I stood, on this granite, surrounded by this ocean. Perhaps they will even feel some of the elation I have experienced here. — Abby Geni

Every traveler should make their own observation. — Lailah Gifty Akita

There is no closed figure in nature. Every shape participates with another. No one thing is independent of another, and one thing rhymes with another, and light gives them shape. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

The commonest forms of amateur natural history in the United States are probably gardening, bird watching, the maintenance of aquarium fish, and nature photography. — Marston Bates

Much is missed if we have eyes only for the bright colors. Nature should be viewed without distinction ... She makes no choice herself; everything that happens has equal significance. Nothing can be dispensed with. This is a common mistake that many people make: They think that half of nature can be destroyed - the uncomfortable half - while still retaining the acceptable and the pleasing side. — Eliot Porter

I have a hunch that our obsession with photography arises from an unspoken pessimism; it is our nature to believe the good things will not last ... But photos provide a false sense of security> like our flawed memory, they are guaranteed to fade ... We take photographs in order to remember, but it is in the nature of a photograph to forget (pg 157) — Michelle Richmond

PHOTOGRAPHY is the best way, where you can SAVE your sweet PAST. — Aman Verma

Nature photographs downright bore me for some reason or other. I think: 'Oh, yes. Look at that sand dune. What of it?' — Walker Evans

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual. — Nickolas Muray

More and more are turning to photography as a medium of expression as well as communication. The leavening of aesthetic approaches continues. While it is too soon to define the characteristic of the photographic style today, one common denominator, rooted in tradition, seems in the ascendancy. The direct use of the camera for what it can do best, and that is the revelation, interpretation, and discovery of the world of man and of nature. The greatest challenge to the photographer is to express the inner significance through the outward form. — Beaumont Newhall

There are five of him there, and yet the nature of the trick photography denies the possibility of eye contact among the various selves. Each one is condemned to go on staring into space, as if under the gaze of the others, but seeing nothing, never able to see anything. It is a picture of death, a portrait of an invisible man. — Paul Auster

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

Photography is a bridge between science and art. It brings to science what it needs most, the artistic sense, and to art the proof that nothing can be imagined which cannot be matched in the counterpoints of nature. — Ernst Haas

And even being in the middle of it, at the LVMH group with Dior, there are certain parts of it that I'm just not really in, because it's not in me or my nature. The whole scene around it, the events, the photography ... It's never really been my thing. But I don't take a critical position on people who are very much about that either. — Raf Simons

Orson Welles was a force of nature, who just came in and wiped the slate clean. And Citizen Kane is the greatest risk-taking of all time in film. I don't think anything had even seen anything quite like it. The photography was also unlike anything we'd seen. The odd coldness of the filmmaker towards the character reflects his own egomania and power, and yet a powerful empathy for all of them
it's very interesting. It still holds up, and it's still shocking. It takes storytelling and throws it up in the air. — Martin Scorsese

Becoming emancipated at 14, my life wasn't normal. I didn't have to go to school, so I didn't. I was rebellious by nature. I spent my 20s focusing on my company, Flower Films, and producing movies. Now that I'm almost 30, I would like to try other things in lie. I'm crazy about photography, and I want to take an art history class. — Drew Barrymore

Photography is a witness against the mistaken opinion that art is an imitation of nature. — Heinrich Heine

Photography is nature seen from the eyes outwards. Painting is nature seen from the eyes inwards. — Charles Sheeler

Actually, it's nature itself that creates the most beautiful pictures, I'm only choosing the perspective. — Katja Michael

If I could find them (assemblages) in nature I would photograph them. I make them because through photography I have a knowledge of things that can't be found. — Frederick Sommer

But I've always been a sucker for externals alone: the shape, the shine, what the surface suggests to my palm. So mechanically disinclined it's verging on criminal, I never understood the beauty of an object's workings until Linny sat my reluctant self down one day and showed me her camera. Within fifteen minutes, I had fallen hard for the whole gadgety, eyelike nature of the thing: a tiny piece of glass slowing, bending, organizing light - light - into your grandmother, the Grand Canyon, the begonia on the windowsill, the film keeping the image like a secret. Grandmother, canyon, begonia tucked neatly into the sleek black box, like bugs in a jar. My mind boggled. — Marisa De Los Santos

If we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear - but the closest scrutiny of the photogenic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented. — Edgar Allan Poe

For spiritual companions I have had the many artists who have relied on nature to help shape their imagination. And their most elaborate equipment was a deep reverence for the world through which they passed. Photographers share something with these artists. We seek only to see and to describe with our own voices, and, though we are seldom heard as soloists, we cannot photograph the world in any other way. — Sam Abell

I may be wrong, but the essential illustrative nature of most documentary photography, and the worship of the object per se, in our best nature photography, is not enough to satisfy the man of today, compounded as he is of Christ, Freud, and Marx. — Aaron Siskind

Their intensive 1 -day nature photography instructional seminars. Both love to teach others how to make their own fine photographs. — Anonymous

Practice the mechanics of making photographs until it becomes second nature. — Fred Picker

It is because of the servility of photography that I am fundamentally contemptuous of this chance invention which will never be an art but which plagiarizes nature by means of optics. (1848) — Alphonse De Lamartine

The nature that is in the location of my films can be seen in my photography, and I want my films to become closer to my photography and more distant from storytelling. It is true that these are completely separate milieus, but in my opinion, the ideal situation for me is for these two areas - photography and cinema - to become closer to one another. — Abbas Kiarostami

Nature is a picture waiting to be taken. — Katja Michael

Many cherish the idea that a photograph is an exact presentment of nature, and accept without question the paradox that a photograph cannot lie. Actually there never was a more unmitigated liar. — Walter J. Phillips

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

Twentieth-century art has allowed me to see things in a cryptic way. I love the butterfly's wings, which disappear when folded and when open leave this brilliant, intense pronouncement of nature, 'Here I am.' — Emmet Gowin

My emotions, instincts, and interests are all with nature. — Eliot Porter

Every photograph is a fiction with pretensions to truth. Despite everything that we have been inculcated, all that we believe, photography always lies; it lies instinctively, lies because its nature does not allow it to do anything else. — Joan Fontcuberta

I became interested in photography during my first visit to the United States. I was a student at a university in Holland. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the American West. That was when I learned about the tradition of nature in American photography. — Frans Lanting

The whole nature of photography has changed with the advent of a camera in everybody's hand. — Sally Mann

I think that the exactitude of the photograph has a sort of compelling nature based in its power to duplicate life. But to me the real power of photography is based in death: the fact that somehow it can enliven that which is not there in a kind of stultifying frightened way, because it seems to me that part of one's life is made up of a constant confrontation with one's own death. — Barbara Kruger

Realism without naturalism... is a leading motif in Modern Art. There is a move away from the struggle to perfect the reflection of Nature in Art's mirror, which I attribute to the all-pervading effects of photography...You must serve the tradition without being its slave. Remember you are an artist, not a draughtsman. — Tom Holt

Many photographers think they are photographing nature when they are only caricaturing her. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Compelling outdoor imagery always combines some kind of personal connection to nature and skillful technique. The former seems to be a form of grace, and the latter an act of the will. — George B. Ward

If you don't capture the moments, it will be gone forever. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Photography started as a means of getting reference material for my paintings of nature subjects. — Nigel Dennis

In a world of disturbing images, the general body of photography is bland, dealing complacently with nature and treating our preconceptions as insights. Strange, private worlds rarely slip past our guard ... — Henry Holmes Smith

Photography promises an enhanced mastery of nature, but photography also threatens conflagration and anarchy. — Allan Sekula

Since the recording process is instantaneous, and the nature of the image such that it cannot survive corrective handwork, it is obvious that the finished print must be created in full before the film is exposed. — Edward Weston

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

If art is the poetic interpretation of nature, photography is the exact translation; it is exactitude in art or the complement of art. (1854) — Charles Negre

Photography, when used as a representational art, is not a mere copy of nature. This is proved by the rarity of the 'good' photograph. — Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

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

If I didn't have a conviction that a serious painter can portray Nature more profoundly than the best colour photography, I'd probably give it all up or go abstract or take up photography. — E. J. Hughes

The photogram, or camera-less record of forms produced by light, which embodies the unique nature of the photographic process, is the real key to photography. — Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

When you take pictures of nature with passion, nature poses for you more passionately! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

A work of art is itself an object, first of all, and so manipulation is unavoidable: it's a prerequisite. But I needed the greater objectivity of the photograph in order to correct my own way of seeing: for instance, if I draw an object from nature, I start to stylize and to change it in accordance with my personal vision and my training. But if I paint from a photograph, I can forget all the criteria that I get from these sources. I can paint against my will, as it were. And that, to me, felt like an enrichment. — Gerhard Richter

It is not in the nature of lenses to tell the whole truth. They are instruments of exaggeration and belittlement. — Walter J. Phillips

Nature is beautiful in all its chaos. However, a nature photograph is beautiful only in the absence of chaos. — Mike MacDonald

Photography begins not in the camera but in the
mind and the eye. The real work is one of noticing and appreciating, seeing things clearly and differently, and
sharing that vision with others. I have developed my
vision and my photographic craft in order to bring
the beauty of nature to light in a fresh way that
can inspire and nourish people. — Bill Atkinson

Wilderness, to me, is a spiritual necessity. The mysterious spiritual experience of being close to natural restored my soul [after the death of his son]. My experience reinforced by dedication to use the art of photography as an inspiration for others to work together to save nature's places of spiritual sanctuary for future generations. — Clyde Butcher

Nature photography ... that acknowledges what is wrong, is admittedly sometimes hard to bear - it has to encompass our mistakes. Yet in the long run, it is important; in order to endure our age of apocalypse, we have to be reconciled not only to avalanche and hurricane, but to ourselves. — Robert Adams

"Only with effort can the camera be forced to lie: basically it is an honest medium: so the photographer is much more likely to approach nature in a spirit of inquiry, of communion, instead of with the saucy swagger of self-dubbed "artists"." — Edward Weston

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 only nature I'm interested in is my own nature. — Aaron Siskind

I'm not satirical in a traditional way. What I do is more about creating caricatures and cartoons. I am commentating on the nature of how we live through photography, and how you can twist an angle to create a different perception of a person. — Alison Jackson

The importance of immobility and silence to photographic authority, the nonfilmic nature of this authority, leads me to some remarks on the relationship of photography with death. Immobility and silence are not only two objective aspects of death, they are also its main symbols, they figure it. — Christian Metz

Photography is all about capturing a mood, a feeling. I feel a special connection with nature, often very powerful. This late afternoon was phenomenal. Standing on the edge of the ocean, I gasped in awe as the holy light illuminated this cathedral window. Witnessing such a moment and capturing it is what I live for. Mother Nature is so powerful, I never underestimate Her. — Peter Lik

I became passionate about nature filmmaking when I graduated from UCLA, and one of the things I always wanted to do was shoot really high quality film, so I got into time-lapse photography - so that means when you shoot a flower, you're shooting, like, one frame every twenty minutes, so that's basically two seconds of a film per day. — Louie Schwartzberg

Still, there is a basic reticence about his approach that feels refreshing in today's culture of maximum exposure. Brandt did not go to great lengths to turn people into icons, nor did he presume to show their "true nature" in something so transient as a photograph. Instead, he used photography's special qualities to suggest intimate things about his subjects, things that cannot be put into words, and may not even be possible to put into pictures. — Sebastian Smee

One sees differently with color photography than black-and-white ... in short, visualization must be modified by the specific nature of the equipment and materials being used. — Ansel Adams

A photograph of a woman crying tells me nothing about grief. Or a photograph of a woman ecstatic tells me nothing about ecstasy. What is the nature of these emotions? The problem with photography is that it only deals with appearances. — Duane Michals

All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence. Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty. — Andre Bazin

Photography by nature is spiritual, considering it comes from the darkness to show the light. — Kevin Russo

Photography is, by its nature, exploitative. It's whether you use this process with a sense of responsibility or not. I feel that I do so. My conscience is clear. — Martin Parr

The point of my photography has always been to challenge myself, to go a little further than my Germanic discipline and Teutonic nature would traditionally permit me to. — Helmut Newton

All technical refinements discourage me. Perfect photography, larger screens, hi-fi sound, all make it possible for mediocrities slavishly to reproduce nature; and this reproduction bores me. What interests me is the interpretation of life by an artist. The personality of the film maker interests me more than the copy of an object. — Jean Renoir

Photography is a medium, a language, through which I might come to experience directly, live more closely with, the interaction between myself and nature. — Paul Caponigro

Nothing seemed to me more appropriate than to project an image of our time with absolute fidelity to nature by means of photography. — August Sander

When you look at nature, you see a hidden mystery that gives a special flavor to the photograph. — Abbas Kiarostami

Photographs will always be impressive because they show us nature, and all artists will find in them a world of sensations. The photographer must therefore intervene as little as possible, so as not to cause photography to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses, notwithstanding its defects. — Henri Matisse

The photographer is now charging real beasts, beleaguered and too rare to kill. Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature - tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures. — Susan Sontag