Quotes & Sayings About Street Photography

Polaroid, you know, goes against everything that photography is now. You can't make multiples. Only one exists. I love that. By the way, while we've been talking I've now seen a total of three people I know walking on 8th street. — Laurel Nakadate

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

It is to be regretted that no mental method of daguerreotype or photography has yet been discovered by which the characters of men can be reduced to writing and put into grammatical language with an unerring precision of truthful description. How often does the novelist feel, ay, and the historian also and the biographer, that he has conceived within his mind and accurately depicted on the tablet of his brain the full character and personage of man, and that nevertheless, when he flies to pen and ink to perpetuate the portrait, his words forsake, elude, disappoint, and play the deuce with him, till at the end of a dozen pages the man described has no more resemblance to the man conceived than the signboard at the coner of the street has to the Duke of Cambridge? — Anthony Trollope

The only thing which completely was an amazement to me and brought me to photography was the work of Munkacsi. When I saw the photograph of Munkacsi of the black kids running in a wave, I couldn't believe such a thing could be caught with the camera. I said, 'Damn it', I took my camera and went out into the street. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

The main thing I love about street photography is that you find the answers you don't see at the fashion shows. You find information for readers so they can visualize themselves. — Bill Cunningham

I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photography - that it is purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in the with the history of painting and other art forms. — Joel Meyerowitz

Street photography is art and if art is a crime, please God, forgive me. — Thomas Leuthard

For five weeks, the Associated Press had provided the world with lurid coverage of the attack on Virgil Earp, which was labeled Cow Boy revenge for what was being called "the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral" because it took too long to set the type for "Gunfight in the Vacant Lot behind Camillus Fly's Photography Studio Near Fremont Street. — Mary Doria Russell

Your most important gear is your eye, heart and soul. — Marius Vieth

Photoshop and Lightroom help me transform my photos into what my heart felt, but my camera couldn't quite capture! — Marius Vieth

The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process - a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made - constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes - but photographs, as the man on the street put, were taken. — John Szarkowski

It's neither our culture nor our race which
interconnects us. It's Street Photography. — Thomas Leuthard

Slow down, take time, allow yourself to be wildly diverted from your plan. People are the soul of the place; don't forget to meet them and enjoy their company as you explore a place. — David DuChemin

Before the first press pictures, the ordinary man would visualize only those events that took place near him, on his street or in his village. Photography opened a window. As the reader's outlook expanded, the world began to shrink. — Gisele Freund

I have always felt that a lot of the most interesting work, not just mine but other people's, falls into [the] nether area, somewhere between the worlds of documentary and photojournalism (two very vague words) and the world of art. I think a lot of street photography falls into this nether area. — Alex Webb

Photography is essentially an act of recognition by street photographers, not an act of invention. Photographers might respond to an old man's face, or an Arbus freak, or the way light hits a building - and then they move on. Whereas in all the other art forms, take William Blake, everything that came to that paper never existed before. It's the idea of alchemy, of making something from nothing. — Duane Michals

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

I started out on photography accidentally. A policeman came to a stop at the end of my street, and a guy knifed him at the end of my street. That's how I became a photographer. I photographed the gangs that I went to school with. — Don McCullin

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

This, too, was like seeing double. This was where my heartaches began.

In combat zones there is no structure, the form of things changes all the time. Safety, danger, control, panic, these and other labels constantly attach and detach themselves from places and people. When you emerge from such a space it stays with you, its otherness randomly imposes itself on the apparent stability of your peaceful home-town streets. What-if becomes the truth, you imagine buildings exploding in Gramercy Park, you see craters appear in the middle of Washington Square, and women carrying shopping bags drop dead on Delancey Street, bee-stung by sniper fire. You take pictures of your small patch of Manhattan and ghost images begin to appear in them, negative phantoms of the distant dead. Double exposure: like Kirlian photography, it becomes a new kind of truth. — Salman Rushdie

When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls! — Ted Grant

Street Photography is like fishing. Catching the fish is more exciting than eating it ... — Thomas Leuthard

I have problems with a lot of photography, particularly street photography and photojournalism - objectifying the other, finding the contempt and exoticism that you might feel within yourself or toward yourself and projecting it out to others. There can be an abusive power to photography, too. — Barbara Kruger

I only know how to approach a place by walking. For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown, or the secret heat of the known awaits just around the corner. — Alex Webb