Photography Story Quotes & Sayings

Why should there be only one sort of photography? I want to create images with elements of my choosing, narrative or evocative ... I give myself a literary frame, I tell a story. — Sarah Moon

If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life. I mean people are going to say, You're crazy. Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid. — Diane Arbus

Photography must be integrated with the story. — James Wong Howe

What's required of me in the field is to feel,' Stirton says with emphasis. 'And trying to take that feeling and put it in a form that communicates a particular set of emotions or circumstances - whether that involves depicting masculine pride, or a particular kind of suffering, or love, or closeness - my primary job is to feel and to try to put that feeling into some kind of visual form. My goal is to get to the heart of each story, you know? I'm trying to evolve in my work. — Antonella Gambotto-Burke

In 1990 I did a story with Helena Christensen about a woman who lives in a trailer in the middle of the desert and finds a little crushed UFO with a martian who has survived the crash. She takes him home, and they fall in love. Later he has to meet with his fellow martians who have arrived to rescue him. It's a sad ending. This was my first truly narrative story and apparently the first narrative story in fashion photography. — Peter Lindbergh

You see, i f you have t rue photographic vision, you have clar i ty and i f you have
clarity, you don't need to explain or defend your images.
Clar i ty is about what emot ions or feel ings the image is t rying to evoke, not the fact s
behind the image.
Photographic clar i ty is about passion of purpose. I t 's about a single-minded desi re
to protect a memory. I t 's about story tel l ing wi th a camera that 's so power ful , no
words are necessary. — Scott Bourne

Story Climax is the fourth of the five-part structure. This crowning Major Reversal is not necessarily full of noise and violence. Rather, it must be full of meaning. If I could send a telegram to the film producers of the world, it would be these three words: "Meaning Produces Emotion." Not money; not sex; not special effects; not movie stars; not lush photography. — Robert McKee

The art in photography is literary art before it is anything else: its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial ... The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art. — Clement Greenberg

I think people just see cinematography as being about photography and innovative shots and beautiful lighting. We all want our movies to look great visually, to be beguiling and enticing, but I think that what really defines a great cinematographer is one who loves story. — Seamus McGarvey

Anyone can take a picture of poverty; it's easy to focus on the dirt and hurt of the poor. It's much harder - and much more needful - to pry under that dirt and reveal the beauty and dignity of people that, but for their birth into a place and circumstance different from our own, are just like ourselves. I want my images to tell the story of those people and to move us beyond pity to justice and mercy. — David DuChemin

Images of people, cities, and landscapes from the air tell a unique story about our personal space and how we relate to one another. I've always aimed to address the bigger picture and later trends. In many ways, what a photographer does is give others a chance to step back and look at their world and gain perspective on where we stand, and what that means. — Vincent Laforet

Photography allows you to be a part of the action and document stories. It is a perfect extension of my body. I can take it pretty much anywhere and tell a story with a photograph. — Chris Burkard

It's important to understand it's OK to control the subject. If most editorial stories were photographed just as they are, editors would end up throwing most in the waste basket. You have to work hard at making an editorial picture. You need to re-stage things, rearrange things so that they work for the story, with truth and without lying. — Alfred Eisenstaedt

If there's one thing I sincerely hope this book might get you to reconsider," Rudder writes in the introduction, "it's what you think about yourself. Because that's what this book is really about. OKCupid is just how I arrived at the story." Rudder wants to convince us that data is how we can arrive at our own stories. "As the Internet has democratized journalism, photography, pornography, charity, comedy, and so many other courses of personal endeavor, it will, I hope, eventually democratize our fundamental narrative." Gone are the days when our moment is defined only by researchers, effete columnists or whoever else gets to say what a millennial is. Now, Rudder argues, the story is ours to tell. — Christian Rudder

When I started working in film, I loved photography, I loved the image, I loved telling the story within a frame, but as I started playing around with film and video, it was like, 'Oh my god.' You just have so much more to play with. — Lynn Shelton

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

The story is told of Michelangelo being asked about his methods for sculpting.
He replied simply that he worked on a block of marble, removing all that was not
part of the sculpture until only the sculpture remained. I suspect this oversimplifies
the art of sculpture, but it's an excellent analogy for photography, which is
essentially an art of exclusion. — David DuChemin

Videos are more like photography. It's not as much about trying to tell a story as it is creating images. — Tatyana Ali

Some photographs are like a Chekhov short story or a Maupassant story. They're quick things and there's a whole world in them. But one is unconscious of it while shooting. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Sometimes you can tell a large story with a tiny subject. — Eliot Porter

For me, documentary photography has always come with great responsibility. Not just to tell the story honestly and with empathy, but also to make sure the right people hear it. When you photograph somebody who is in pain or discomfort, they trust you to make sure the images will act as their advocate. — Giles Duley

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

I don't story board. I do something else, which is, I block it. We then train to the blocking. In other words, when everybody's training, they're actually training a lot of the moves that we are definitely going to use, and then, I do a lot of photography of that, and that becomes where the cameras go. — Michael Mann

If the audience gets everything, if they see the photography and notice that it is good, then the story goes out the window, but if you become involved with the lives of the actors and forget that you are seeing mechanical devices on a huge screen - forget the make-believe - this is the job of the director to involve the audience with the actors. — Frank Capra

With photography, I like to leave a lot of the story, even to myself. — Alex Prager

Photography has become a small world with so many jealous people. You do a story and then a lot of people try to do the same thing. — Sebastiao Salgado

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

For Love...Real Love...The Kind Of Love That Lasts Forever... — Sybil Shae

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

Pictures could not be accessories to the story
evidence
they had to contain the story within the frame; the best picture contained a whole war within one frame. — Tatjana Soli

The only advantage of the CD is that you have a booklet that can tell a bit of a story, but the little covers are just boring. I love vinyl, and I have loads of it. It's the same thing as digital photography versus film photography. It's a quality thing. — Anton Corbijn

Once a photographer is convinced that the camera can lie and that, strictly speaking, the vast majority of photographs are camera lies, inasmuch as they tell only part of a story or tell it in distorted form, half the battle is won. Once he has conceded that photography is not a naturalistic medium of rendition and that striving for naturalism in a photograph is futile, he can turn his attention to using a camera to make more effective pictures. — Andreas Feininger

True photographs tend to remain on the streets, the story almost about to enter the edge of the frame of the snapshot or the shutter closing a moment too late, the story having just abandoned the frame. — Doug Rice

I'm so drawn to photography because you can convey a complex story in a single frame. — Gia Coppola