Photography Subject Quotes & Sayings

How do you find a way to say what an extraordinary experience it is to be alive in this world? That is the kind of subject matter I try to work with. — Keith Carter

Composition in photography is almost as varied as composition in music or words
melodic or atonal, safe or daring
and can enhance subject, theme, and style. Every photograph you take involves you in some compositional decision, even if this is simply where to set up the camera or when to press the button. — Michael Langford

It's nothing but a matter of seeing, thinking, and interest. That's what makes a good photograph. And then rejecting anything that would be bad for the picture. The wrong light, the wrong background, time and so on. Just don't do it, not matter how beautiful the subject is. — Andreas Feininger

Photography has arrived at the point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and even from the subject. In any case, a certain aspect of the subject now belongs to the domain of photography. So shouldn't painters profit from their newly acquired liberty, and make use of it to do other things? — Pablo Picasso

What is a portrait good for, unless it shows just how the subject was seen by the painter? In the old days before photography came in a sitter had a perfect right to say to the artist: "Paint me just as I am." Now if he wishes absolute fidelity he can go to the photographer and get it. — Aubrey Beardsley

Photography is a very subtle thing. You must let the camera take you by the hand, as it were, and lead you into your subject. — Margaret Bourke-White

The photograph isolates and perpetuates a moment of time: an important and revealing moment, or an unimportant and meaningless one, depending upon the photographer's understanding of his subject and mastery of his process. — Edward Weston

In photography, the issue of the integration of form and content is exceptionally difficult because of the widely held belief that photographs must be a kind of vicarious experience of the subject itself. — Peter C Bunnell

To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged, to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing-including, when that is the interest, another person's pain or misfortune. — Susan Sontag

The thing about photography is, some people surround themselves with extremely strong subject matter. And unless you're a moron, you're going to get a really strong photograph. — Andy Summers

Before you shoot an irresistible subject, mute all your senses except sight to find out how much is left for the camera to record. — Andreas Feininger

I'm designing a seductive frame to attract an audience to a subject they would otherwise ignore. And that's what I do in all of my photography - give a stage to things that wouldn't normally receive that stage. — Taryn Simon

I have a master's degree in photography as a fine art, and I would call my work primarily conceptual. I don't carry cameras with me wherever I go. I get an idea of a subject matter I want to deal with and I pull out my cameras. — Leonard Nimoy

Two factors thus emerge as requisites of success in the field of creative photography. First, the subject must be photogenic. Second, its re-creation in a photograph must be based upon technical knowledge, guided and supported by artsitic inspiration. — Andreas Feininger

What is the subject matter of this apparently very personal world? It has been suggested that these shapes and images are underworld characters, the inhabitants of the vast common realm of memories that have gone down below the level of conscious control. It may be they are. The degree of emotional involvement and the amount of free association with the material being photographed would point in that direction. — Aaron Siskind

Documentary photography is becoming more illustrative as people become more familiar with photography's limitations and vulnerabilities. Reality has always been interpreted through layers of manipulation, abstraction, and intervention. But now, it is very much on the surface. I like this honesty about its dishonesty. Every photograph has many truths and none. Photographs are ambiguous, no matter how seemingly scientific they appear to be. They are always subject to an uncontrollable context. This is a tired statement, but worth repeating. — Taryn Simon

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a Leitmotiv. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Perhaps the central question about [Eliot] Porter's work is about the relationship between science, aesthetics, and environmental politics. His brother, the painter and critic Fairfield Porter, wrote in a 1960 review of [Porter's] colour photographs: 'There is no subject and background, every corner is alive,' and this suggests what an ecological aesthetic might look like. — Rebecca Solnit

Photography ... has lived under the tyranny of its subject matter: the object has exercised an almost total domination. — Joan Fontcuberta

I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else. Excitement about the subject is the voltage which pushes me over the mountain of drudgery necessary to produce the final photograph. — Berenice Abbott

To extend the depth of what has been called 'art' into photography requires ... making available to the spectator the amazing transformations the subject undergoes to become the photograph. — Michael Snow

When I first started to take photographs in Czechoslovakia, I met this old gentleman, this old photographer, who told me a few practical things. One of the things he said was, "Josef, a photographer works on the subject, but the subject works on the photographer." — Josef Koudelka

But before all else a work of art is the creation of love. Love for the subject first and for the medium second. Love is the fundamental necessity underlying the need to create, underlying the emotion that gives it form, and from which grows the unfinished product that is presented to the world. Love is the general criterion by which the rare photograph is judged. It must contain it to be not less than the best of which the photographer is capable. — Eliot Porter

I know some photographs that are extraodrinary in their power and conviction, but it is difficult in photography to overcome the superficial power or subject; the concept and statement must be quite convincing in themselves to win over a dramatic and compelling subject situation. — Ansel Adams

Photography is always a kind of stealing. A theft from the subject. Artists are assaulters in a lot of ways, and the viewer is complicit in that assault. — Hanya Yanagihara

Portraits are the most intimate photographs. The image will survive the subject. — Victor Skrebneski

Give half a dozen men the same camera, lenses and plates, and send them to the same place to do the same thing, and all the results will be alike, or so nearly alike as to reveal the real mechanicalness of photography. Yet, curiously enough, this is just one of the most difficult things a photographer can be set to do, to exactly repeat himself, or another. He may use the identical apparatus, know the subject perfectly, and yet be totally unable to bring away an exact replica. — Frederick H. Evans

For me, photography is as much about the way I respond to the subject as it is about the subject itself. — Alec Soth

The subject, the thing itself, is the genesis of all types of photography. — Bill Jay

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

I'm paid to be lucky and that means making your own luck - getting yourself in the right position, in front of the right subject at the right time, and in the right light. — Michael Yamashita

The camera is a remarkable instrument. Saturate yourself with your subject, and the camera will all but take you by the hand and point the way. — Margaret Bourke-White

One teacher told me that my work belonged in the trash. That day I ran out of the classroom and ended up in the library, where there happened to be a black and white photography exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg's photographs of the streets of New York. The subject of his photos were exactly what I was painting about. — Jose Parla

Photography is a demanding action sport. The light can change so quickly. I often find myself sprinting so that I can catch the perfect light falling on a photogenic subject. — Steven Pinker

Once digital came, I could see my images instantly right there on the camera. I think that makes you a better photographer because you can see right there if your subject's eyes are closed or if you exposed it wrong and if it's too bright or dark. You can fix it right here. With film, you wouldn't know until you got the prints back if something was messed up, and then there was nothing you could do. That was a huge advantage. — Scott Kelby

To make images is a way of ordering one's world, of exploring and understanding one's relationship to existence ... The images we make are often ahead of our understanding, but to say "yes" to a subject is also to have recognized, however dimly, a part of oneself; to live with that image, to accept its significance is perhaps to grow in understanding. — John Blakemore

For this very reason I refuse all the tricks of the trade and professional virtuosity which could make me betray my career. As soon as I find a subject which interests me, I leave it to the lens to record it truthfully. Look at the reporters and at the amateur photographer! They both have only one goal; to record a memory or a document. And that is pure photography. — Andre Kertesz

I think you reveal yourself by what you choose to photograph, but I prefer photographs that tell more about the subject. There's nothing much interesting to tell about me; what's interesting is the person I'm photographing, and that's what I try to show. [ ... ] I think each photographer has a point of view and a way of looking at the world ... that has to do with your subject matter and how you choose to present it. What's interesting is letting people tell you about themselves in the picture. — Mary Ellen Mark

The decisive moment, the popular Henri Cartier-Bresson approach to photography in which a scene is stopped and depicted at a certain point of high visual drama, is now possible to achieve at any time. One's photographs, years later, may be retroactively rephotographed by repositioning the photographer or the subject of the photograph, or by adding elements that were never there before but now are made to exist concurrently in a newly elastic sense of space and time. — Fred Ritchin

The purpose of photography is the transmission of a visualized sector of life through the medium of the camera into a mental process that starts with the photographer's thinking about the subject he photographs and is continued in the mind of the spectator. — Roman Vishniac

Some day there may be ... machinery that needs but to be wound up and sent roaming o'er hill and dale, through fields and meadows, by babbling brooks and shady woods - in short, a machine that will discriminately select its subject and, by means of a skillful arrangement of springs and screws, compose its motif, expose the plate, develop, print, and even mount and frame the result of its excursion, so that there will be nothing for us to do but to send it to the Royal Photographic Society's exhibition and gratefully to receive the 'Royal Medal'. — Edward Steichen

Anything that looks like an idea is probably just something that has accumulated, like dust. It looks like I have ideas because I do books that are all on the same subject. That is just because the pictures have piled up on that subject. Finally I realize that I am really interested in it. The pictures make me realize that I am interested in something. — Lee Friedlander

In practice a photographer does not concern himself with philosophical issues while working; he makes photographs, working with subject matter that he thinks will make the pictures. — John Szarkowski

The simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression ... In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a leitmotif. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about. — Richard Avedon

The first picture of his I ever saw was during a lecture at the Rhyl camera club. I was 16 and the speaker was Emrys Jones. He projected the picture upside down. Deliberately, to disregard the subject matter to reveal the composition. It's a lesson I've never forgotten. — Philip Jones Griffiths

Let the subject generate its own photographs. Become a camera. — Minor White

In this, photography is the same thing as love. When my gaze, diving into the sea as my subject, converges with the act of photography, hot sparks fly at the point of intersection. — Shomei Tomatsu

To do a portrait today, I decide how close I can get to my subject. First, of course, mentally or intellectually, then in the viewfinder. Music cues the subject and me when to shoot. The music played during a photography session is most important - stimulating to the subject and to me. As in a film, the music builds or becomes quiet, romantic; just one note sets the actor up to emote for his audience. I want a reciprocal portrait, not a bureaucratic one — Victor Skrebneski

Photography transformed subject into object, and even, one might say, into a museum object: in order to take the first portraits the subject had to assume long poses under a glass roof in bright sunlight; to become an object made one suffer as much as surgical operation; then a device was invented, a kind of prosthesis invisible to the lens, which supported and maintained the body in its passage to immobility: this headrest was the pedestal of the statue I would become, the corset of my imaginary essence. — Roland Barthes

I imagine that the essential gesture of the Operator is to surprise something or someone (through the little hole in the camera), and that this gesture is therefore perfect when it is performed unbeknownst to the subject being photographed. From this gesture derive all photographs whose principle (or better whose alibi) is "shock"; for the photographic "shock" consists less in traumatizing than in revealing what was so well hidden that the actor himself was unaware or unconscious of it. — Roland Barthes

I like to think of photographing as a two-way act of respect. Respect for the medium, by letting it do what it does best, describe. And respect for the subject, by describing it as it is. A photograph must be responsible to both. — Garry Winogrand

There's a rapport that any photographer is going to have with his subject matter. And if you don't have a rapport, you're going to find the task of photographing it difficult. — Bruce Barnbaum

In the absence of a subject with which you are passionately involved, and without the excitement that drives you to grasp it and exhaust it, you may take some beautiful pictures, but not a photographic oeuvre. — Brassai

Photography has almost no reality; it is almost a hundred per cent picture. And painting always has reality: you can touch the paint; it has presence; but it always yields a picture - no matter whether good or bad. That's all the theory. It's no good. I once took some small photographs and then smeared them with paint. That partly resolved the problem, and it's really good - better than anything I could ever say on the subject. — Gerhard Richter

Actually, I'm not all that interested in the subject of photography. Once the picture is in the box, I'm not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren't cooks. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Photography as a subject is a good one. Its history is only about 150 years ... You only have to know about twenty-five or thirty names and that's it. All you need. In painting there are more than 1,000. — William Wegman

Even a fellow with a camera has his favourite subjects, as we can see looking through the Kodak-albums of our friends. One amateur prefers the family group, another bathing scenes, another cows upon an alp, or kittens held upside down in the arms of a black-faced child. The tendency to choose one subject rather than another indicates the photographer's temperament. Nevertheless, his passion is for photography rather than for selection, a kitten will serve when no cows are available ... — E. M. Forster

Scientists are usually nice, organized, logical people who are very cooperative. I always learn a lot of science while shooting science stories and it helps to be able to speak intelligently to a subject about his or her field of work, i.e., do your homework before the photography. — Peter Menzel

Mostly the subject of the photograph, which can be anyone really, coming down the street - someone that has no idea. "Heroism" in photography, just like in a novel, is for everyone. — Hedi Slimane

I never claim my photographs reveal some definitive truth. I claim that this is what I saw and felt about the subject at the time the pictures were made. That's all that any photographer can claim. I do not know any great photographer who would presume otherwise. — David Hurn

While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects)- a material vestigate of its subject in a way that no painting can be ... Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross. — Susan Sontag

The subject I liked best was painting, but the teachers didn't approve of my experiments and sometimes criticized me in front of the whole class. Maybe my love for photography came from that humiliation: a photo is something that you develop and print yourself, in the dark, and that remains in the dark until you decide to show it. — Hiroshi Hamaya

The personality and style of a photographer usually limits the type of subject with which he deals best. For example Cartier-Bresson is very interested in people and in travel; these things plus his precise feeling for geometrical relationships determine the type of pictures he takes best. What is of value is that a particular photographer sees the subject differently. A good picture must be a completely individual expression which intrigues the viewer and forces him to think. — Alexey Brodovitch

Photographers tend not to photograph what they can't see, which is the very reason one should try to attempt it. Otherwise we're going to go on forever just photographing more faces and more rooms and more places. Photography has to transcend description. It has to go beyond description to bring insight into the subject, or reveal the subject, not as it looks, but how does it feel? — Duane Michals

Experience has shown that the more fascinating the subject, the less observant the photographer. — Andreas Feininger

I am not very interested in extraordinary angles. They can be effective on certain occasions, but I do not feel the necessity for them in my own work. Indeed, I feel the simplest approach can often be most effective. A subject placed squarely in the center of the frame, if attention is not distracted from it by fussy surroundings, has a simple dignity which makes it all the more impressive. — Bill Brandt

I think the best way to put it is that newspictures are the noun and the verb; our kind of photography is the adjective and adverb. The newspicture is a single frame; ours, a subject viewed in series. The newspicture is dramatic, all subject and action. Ours shows what's back of the action. — Roy Stryker

Actually, no. I won't ever go digital. I work with thirty-five or large format. I like the hand-jobs, you know. And I still do most of my own printing. I've developed such a profound distaste for touch-up and modern artifice - comes from snapping too many derelicts and detritus, perhaps, but I love it. Photo bloody Shop can go stuff it. A picture should be honest, even if the subject is contrived on the ground, you know; not dolled-up for advertising punch or sex appeal. — Pansy Schneider-Horst

I take more to the subject than to my ideas about it. I am not interested in any idea I have had, the subject is so demanding and so important. — Lee Friedlander

Photography is like a found object. A photographer never makes an actual subject; they just steal the image from the world ... Photography is a system of saving memories. It's a time machine, in a way, to preserve the memory, to preserve time. — Hiroshi Sugimoto

If you are bored with your own photography you are really bored with what you are photographing, so pick a new subject about which you are knowledgeable and enthusiastic. — Bill Jay

Not only did she [Marilyn Monroe] master her own image, create it and ultimately control it, she was the subject of many of the great masters of photography of the 20th century. — Gail Levin

The way men are seen in photography, in fashion, and the way that men look at pictures of themselves has changed in recent years. It is a subject that has come into focus: The masculine image, a man's personal style, changing attitudes to the male face and body, — Mario Testino

It's a pity I am so impatient and careless, as any ordinary person could learn all the techniques of photography in a week. It is the democratic art, i.e. technical skill is practically eliminated - the more foolproof cameras become with focusing and exposure gadgets the better - and artistic quality depends only on choice of subject. — W. H. Auden

Something that I consider 'my invention', since I haven't seen it done anywhere before is 'Super-speed photography'. Now normal high-speed photography involves either a very fast camera at a high frame rate or the act of 'freezing' the motion using flash, while the actual exposure is actually quite long. For much of my high-speed photography with flash I was using shutter speeds of two seconds to give me time to break or shoot whatever my subject was and trigger the flash with a sound activated device. But then I started playing with the idea of using the flash trigger of the camera to actually cause the event. — Desmond Downs

The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity'
of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: 'The subject,' says one handbook for amateur photographers, 'must be simple, free of useless accessories; this is called the Search for Unity. — Roland Barthes

Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past. — Berenice Abbott

It's the subject matter that counts. I'm interested in revealing the subject in a new way to intensify it. A photo is able to capture a moment that people can't always see. — Harry Callahan

The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias. — Susan Sontag

He owned an expensive camera that required thought before you pressed the shutter, and I quickly became his favorite subject, round-faced, missing teeth, my thick bangs in need of a trim. They are still the pictures of myself I like best, for they convey that confidence of youth I no longer possess, especially in front of a camera. — Jhumpa Lahiri

In photography, you always have both the medium and the depicted subject at the same time. — Thomas Ruff

A photographer must always work with the greatest respect for his subject and in terms of his own point of view. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

To see color as form means looking at the image in a new way, trying to free oneself from absorption in subject matter. — Cole Weston

The camera points both ways. In expressing the subject you also express yourself ... — Freeman Patterson

For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. — Diane Arbus

It takes the passage of time before an image of a commonplace subject can be assessed. The great difficulty of what I attempt is seeing beyond the moment; the everydayness of life gets in the way of the eternal. — George A Tice

Looking and seeing are two different things. What matters is the relationship with the subject. — Christophe Agou

The portrait is the subject matter in photography where the problems of the media are the most visible. — Thomas Struth

That frame of mind that you need to make fine pictures of a very wonderful subject, you cannot do it by not being lost yourself. — Dorothea Lange

Don't look for "depth" but instead search for subject aspects which prove the presence of depth. — Andreas Feininger

I never shot on sets, but if I was traveling somewhere or on location, I would always have my camera, and I'd always be - it's that kind of fly on the wall approach to photography, though. I don't engage the subject. I like to sneak around, skulk about in the dark. — Jessica Lange

I wanted [photography] to be more than a document, to be something that is as close as you could possibly be to the subject. — Chris Killip

For photography is a way to capture the moment - not just any moment, but the important one, this one moment out of all time when your subject is revealed to the fullest - that moment of perfection which comes once and is not repeated. — Edward Weston

The simplicity of photography lies in the fact that it is very easy to make a picture. The staggering complexity of it lies in the fact that a thousand other pictures of the same subject would have been equally easy. — John Szarkowski

If there is any method in the way I take pictures, I believe it lies in this: See the subject first. Do not try to force it to be a picture of this, that or the other thing. Stand apart from it. Then something will happen. The subject will reveal itself. — Bill Brandt

The idea that any photography can't be personal is madness! I see something; it goes through my eye, brain, heart, guts; I choose the subject. What could be more personal than that? — Cornell Capa

The most important thing ... is not clicking the shutter ... it is clicking with the subject. — Alfred Eisenstaedt

Nudity in photography, whether involving adults or children, is a subject sinking under a freight of political and moral disapproval it could never hope to support, and this is not the place for me to get out the bilge pump. I will only say that critics who tremble so fiercely at the thought of the voyeuristic male gaze miss the point that distance generates mystery and enchantment, and expresses the awe with which the male imagination regards all women. — J.G. Ballard

To compose a subject well means no more than to see and present it in the strongest manner possible. — Edward Weston