What Is Photography Quotes & Sayings

Photography works upon the human eye: what is seen is reflected in the brain without the need for complicated thought. In this way the bourgeoisie takes advantage of the mental indolence of the masses and does good business as well. — Willi Munzenberg

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

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

What is truth in photography? It can be told in a hundred different ways. Every thirtieth of a second when the shutter snaps, its capturing a different piece of information. — Sally Mann

When I photograph, I do not think much. If you looked at my contacts you would ask yourself: "What is this guy doing?" But I keep working with my contacts and with my prints, I look at them all the time. I believe that the result of this work stays in me and at the moment of photographing it comes out, without my thinking of it. — Josef Koudelka

Egon Schiele is my favorite painter. There's just something about art - photography, painting, music, plays - whatever you see, sometimes there's a gut reaction that's more important or more visceral than what your brain is thinking about. You can't explain that reaction. It's like what happens when you fall in love. — Albert Hammond Jr.

Photography is such an important instrument in the education of our feelings and perception because of its duality. Photography represents the world we know, and suggests a world beyond what we can see. Creativity is the gap between perception and knowledge. — Emmet Gowin

People believe pictures. It's a photograph that's in your passport, not a painting. Now,
George Bernard Shaw said, 'I would exchange every painting of Christ for one snapshot.' That's what the power of photography is. — Philip Jones Griffiths

Also, Willie, I dig telling the truth. Words can be twisted but a photo never lies.
Sutton laughs.
What's funny? Photographer says.
Nothing. Except - that's pure horseshit kid. I can't think of anything that lies more than a photo. In fact every photo is a dirty stinking lie because it's a frozen moment - and time can't be frozen. Some of the biggest lies I've ever run across have been photos. Some of them were of me. — J.R. Moehringer

There is a lot of social photography being done now to point to the untruth of photography. It's getting very dull now. So, okay photography doesn't tell the truth. So what? Everyone has known this forever. — Abelardo Morell

My love of photography is melded with the ability to capture what I want to remember in the moment I want to never forget. — Devin Dygert

'Ornithologists concluded that migratory birds take hundreds of naps as they fly; they also practice unilateral eye closure, in which one eye closes, thereby permitting half the brain to sleep.' Is this what happens when photographers close one eye to look through a viewfinder? If so, they might be operating with only half a brain. Perhaps that explains ... — Bill Jay

What Bell is to the telephone - or, more aptly, what Eastman is to photography - Haloid could be to xerography. — Chester Carlson

I work alone. Humans are incredible, because when you come alone, they will receive you, they accept you, they protect you, they give you all things that you need, and they teach you all things you must know. When you come with two persons or three persons, you have a group in front of them. They don't discuss with the new persons what is important to them ... — Sebastiao Salgado

What I like best about underwater photography is giving a visual voice to the invisible. What I like least is the prospect of drowning. — David Doubilet

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

What I believe is really good in the so-called documentary approach to photography is the addition of lyricism.[this quality] is usually produced unconsciously and even unintentionally and accidentally by the cameraman. — Walker Evans

With the camera, it's all or nothing. You either get what you're after at once, or what you do has to be worthless. I don't think the essence of photography has the hand in it so much. The essence is done very quietly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine. I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking. After knowing what to take, you have to do the editing. — Walker Evans

It might take us a lifetime to find out what it is we need to say. Most of us fall into where our feelings are headed while we're quite young. But the beauty of all this uncertainty would be that in the process of exhausting all the possibilities, we might actually stumble unconsciously into the recognition of something that's useful to us, that speaks to a deep need within ourselves. At the same time, I like to think that in order for any of us to really do anything new, we can't know exactly what it is we are doing. — Emmet Gowin

Perhaps most intriguing of all is that it is possible to photograph what is impossible for the human eye to see - cumulative time. — Michael Kenna

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

I don't know whether we think in moving images or whether we think in still images. I have a suspicion that on our hard drive, our series within our brains, [exist] still photographs of very important moments in our lives ... That we think in terms of still images and that what the photography is doing is making direct contact with the human hard drive and recording for all time a sense of what happened. — Jon Snow

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 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

In most of my photographic pieces I have manipulated the quality of the evidence that people assign to photography, in order to subvert it, or to show that photography lies - that what it conveys is not reality but a set of cultural codes. — Christian Boltanski

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see. — Dorothea Lange

It's said that in the beginning was the word, but for me the beginning is always an image. When I think about a conversation, it always starts with images. And what I love about photography is the inscription of a single moment: it's completely ephemeral. You take the photograph, and one second later, everything has changed. — Abbas Kiarostami

It's the difference between your wife's passport photograph and the portraits you took when you got
engaged. Both may have been created with similar technology, but what stands in that great gulf between them are the passion you have for your wife, the knowledge you have of her personality, and your willingness to use your craft, time, and energy to express that. One says, "She looks like this." The other says, "This is who she is to me. It's how I feel about her. See how amazing she is? — David DuChemin

There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are. — Ernst Haas

What's so incredibly amusing with photography is that while seemingly an art of the surface, it catches things I haven't even noticed. And it pains me not to have seen things in all their depth. — Jacques-Henri Lartigue

What Pamuk is also engaging with at this point and throughout the book is the relationship of memory and photography and the argument put forward by Walter Benjamin and other commentators that photography creates a 'false' or 'counter' memory which results in what Sontag calls the replacement of memory by a photograph.24 — Patrizia Di Bello

To me, the main and most exciting thing about photography is to meet people. The picture is the result of what happened between me and them on the set. — Francesco Carrozzini

Photography for me is not looking, it's feeling. If you can't feel what you're looking at, then you're never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures. — Don McCullin

When you take a picture you haven't a clue that it is going to be what it is. Maybe you have a clue but you don't really know. There are too many possibilities. Part of the game is how many balls you can juggle. It is to me. When you are 12 you can juggle two. Maybe when you are 50 you can juggle five. That is an interesting concept to me: how much I can put in and still make it pull together? — Lee Friedlander

When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can. — D.H. Lawrence

I have a way to photograph. You work with space, you have a camera, you have a frame, and then a fraction of a second. It's very instinctive. What you do is a fraction of a second, it's there and it's not there. But in this fraction of a second comes your past, comes your future, comes your relation with people, comes your ideology, comes your hate, comes your love - all together in this fraction of a second, it materializes there. — Sebastiao Salgado

Photography is a lot like telling a large predatory cat what to do-while an audience of people you can't see watches you. — Dorothea Lange

I really try to divorce myself from any thought of possible use of this stuff. That's part of the discipline. My only purpose while I'm working is to try to make interesting photographs, and what to do with them is another act - an alter consideration. Certainly while I'm working, I want them to be as useless as possible. — Garry Winogrand

One thing that struck me early is that you don't put into a photograph what's going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in. — Diane Arbus

The paradox is that some of the most artistically valuable contemporary photographs are content with being photographs, are not under the same compulsion to pass themselves off - or pimp themselves out - as art. The simple truth is that the best exponents of the art of contemporary photography continue to produce work that fits broadly within the tradition of what Evans termed 'documentary style'. — Geoff Dyer

It is essential for the photographer to know the effect of his lenses. The lens is his eye, and it makes or ruins his pictures. A feeling for composition is a great asset. I think it is very much a matter of instinct. It can perhaps be developed, but I doubt if it can be learned. To achieve his best work, the young photographer must discover what really excites him visually. He must discover his own world. — Bill Brandt

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

What to me is anathema - a corpse-like, outmoded hangover - is for photography to be a bad excuse for another medium ... Is not photography good enough in itself, that it must be made to look like something else, supposedly superior? — Berenice Abbott

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

Just as a fisherman cannot catch fish unless his line is in the water, a wildlife photographer cannot shoot great wildlife images unless he or she is out there with camera in hand and the knowledge of what to do then the 'magnificent moment' occurs. — George H. Harrison

Before the invention of photography, significant moments in the flow of our lives would be like rocks placed in a stream: impediments that demonstrated but didn't diminish the volume of the flow and around which accrued the debris of memory, rich in sight, smell, taste, and sound. No snapshot can do what the attractive mnemonic impediment can: when we outsource that work to the camera, our ability to remember is diminished and what memories we have are impoverished. — Sally Mann

The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how. — Margaret Atwood

Pictures, regardless of how they are created and recreated, are intended to be looked at. This brings to the forefront not the technology of imaging, which of course is important, but rather what we might call the eyenology (seeing). — Henri Cartier-Bresson

This idea of imposing an order is very interesting to me. Photography is in essence an analytic medium. ... In photography, you start with the whole world and every decision you make imposes an order on it. The question is to what extent it's an idealized order I'm imposing or is it an order that grows out of what the world looks like. — Stephen Shore

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

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

Photographs are believed more than words; thus they can be used persuasively to show people who have never taken the trouble to look what is there. — Eliot Porter

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

Photography is solitary and there are lags between seeing with your eyes and seeing through the lens, and then seeing the image on your computer ... I often see things after the fact. This revelatory quality includes a sense of playfulness, because you're not sure what the consequences are going to be. — Christian Marclay

You have a lifetime to learn technique. But I can teach you what is more important than technique, how to see; learn that and all you have to do afterwards is press the shutter. — Garry Winogrand

What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that's gone forever, impossible to reproduce. — Karl Lagerfeld

The main thing is to study pictures and stop listening to the pontifictaions of photographers. Photographers aren't oracles of wisdom. If they're good photographers, then take a good look at their pictures - what else do you need? — Elliott Erwitt

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

Pleasure in this respect is like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative film; we develop it later, when we are at home, and have once again found at our disposal that inner darkroom, the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people. — Marcel Proust

I am trying to make some kind of connection to what is going on in the world, to make some sort of contact. And I use the instruments that our modern world offers, these extraordinary instruments of photography and film and computers. — Leon Golub

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

Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation. Let me insist on the obvious: Languages trail immense, individual histories behind them, and no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography, or acting for that matter, are representational in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it does not have much, if anything, to do with what is called literal meaning. A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable. — Edith Grossman

Photography is a source of raw materials as I believe the camera is never perfect and will never be able to express in full what I see and feel. — Nikolay Semyonov

It was uncanny. You press a button and a man drops dead a hundred meters away. It seemed hollow and remote, falsifying everything. It was a trick of the lenses. The man is an accurate picture. Then he is upside down. Then he is right side up. You shoot at a series of images conveyed to you through a metal tube. The force of a death should be enormous but how can you know what kind of man you've killed or who was the braver and stronger if you have to peer through layers of glass that deliver the image but obscure the meaning of the act? War has a conscience or it's ordinary murder. — Don DeLillo

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

Photography is the very conscience of painting. It constantly reminds the later of what it must not do. — Brassai

What you see is real - but only on the particular level to which you've developed your sense of seeing. You can expand your reality by developing new ways of perceiving. — Wynn Bullock

Photography is pretty simple stuff. You just react to what you see, and take many, many pictures. — Elliott Erwitt

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

What I love about photography, and it's the same thing I love about acting, really, is that it forces you, like, right into the moment, where you can't be distracted, where you can't be, like, thinking about other things or ahead of yourself or behind yourself. — Jessica Lange

I think this is the most exciting time in the history of photography. Technology is expanding what photographers can do, like the microscope and the telescope expanded what scientists could do. — Richard Misrach

Photography is unlike any other art form. In the other arts there is always a continuous interplay between the artist and his art. He has the painting or sculpture before him. What we have tried to do is to provide a medium for "artistic expression" to anyone with only a reasonable amount of time. By giving him a camera system with which he need only control his selection of focus, composition and lighting, we free him to select the moment and to criticize immediately what he has done. We enable him to see what else he wants to do on the basis of what he has just learned. — Edwin Land

Contemporary art photography is paradoxical. Anyone can look at it and form an opinion about what they see. Yet it usually represents aesthetic and theoretical positions that only a small minority of well-informed viewers can access. — Lucy Soutter

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

A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true. — Don DeLillo

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

The magic possibility of framing a certain space and time is what brought me to photography. This process of recording elements of 3 dimensions in the flow of time, and fixing them in a 2 dimensional image, creates a new context for the elements of the photograph ... — Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

I create other worlds, magical never-never lands where the camera is my weapon and the battles I fight are with the elements. i stretch the laws of the mind and displace people from their realities to capture a side of them they didn't even know they had. Photography has the ability to freeze people in this time and space - no matter what happens after that moment, it cannot change - they are exactly how i want them to be. — Tyler Shields

When you pose for a photograph, it's behind a smile that isn't yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people. — Richard Avedon

You know, I really don't think you learn from teachers. You learn from work. I think what you learn, really, is how to be- you have to be your own toughest critic, and you only learn that from work, from seeing work. — Garry Winogrand

I think one of the shortcomings of reality, of real experience, is most people's inability to examine something carefully and thoughtfully without moving around or being distracted by something else. What photography does really is it forces you to examine something you normally wouldn't. — Grant Mudford

Obviously, we can see what was in front of the camera, but if a photograph is honestly made, it's a bit of a self-portrait. I think it's impossible for a photographer who is working honestly to keep this from happening. — John Sexton

To me photography can be simultaneously both a record and a mirror or window of self-expression the camera is generally assumed to be unable to depict that which is not visible to the eye and yet, the photographer who wields it well can depict what lies unseen in his memory. — Eikoh Hosoe

I am not an artist, and I never intended to be one. I hope I have made some good photographs, but what I really hope is that I have done some good photo stories with memorable images that make a point, and, perhaps, even make a difference. — Cornell Capa

What I've always liked about photography is that it's such a direct way of showing what's on my mind. I see something. I show it to you. — Zoe Leonard

The photograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style. Both in its way of informing, and in what it informs of, it is my source. — Gerhard Richter

Most people feel that the world looks like the photograph. I've always assumed that the photograph is nearly right, but that little bit by which it misses makes it miss by a mile. This is what I grope at. — Martin Gayford

The photography is not the aim of the work; the articulation of the work through photography is another way of understanding what's going on and what's happening outside. — Andy Goldsworthy

A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed. — Ansel Adams

The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence - as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence ... The Photograph then becomes a bizarre (i)medium(i), a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest (o)shared(i) hallucination (on the one hand 'it is not there,' on the other 'but it has indeed been'): a mad image, chafed by reality. — Roland Barthes

Searching is everything - going beyond what you know. And the test of the search is really in the things themselves, the things you seek to understand. What is important is not what you think about them, but how they enlarge you. — Wynn Bullock

If one really knew what one was doing, why do it? It seems to me if you had the answer why ask the question? The thing is there are so many questions. — Lee Friedlander

Traditionally, photography is supposed to capture an event that has passed; but that is not what I'm looking for. Photography brings the past into the present when you look at it. — Julian Schnabel

If you do not see what is around you every day, what will you see when you go to Tangiers? — Freeman Patterson

What I'm trying to describe is that it's impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else's ... That somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own. — Diane Arbus

Little wonder that we ... find the old pictures of openness - pictures usually without any blur, and made by what seems a ritual of patience - wonderful. They restore to us knowledge of a place we seek but lose in the rush of our search. Though to enjoy even the pictures, much less the space itself, requires that we be still longer than is our custom. — Robert Adams

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

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

Photography is to the layman perhaps the most enticing art. As a buff and a follower, at a respectful distance, I find myself like others, having the heart of a Steiglitz with hands that sometimes seem impeded by boxing gloves. What is exasperating is that one can feel closer to managing the skills of photography than most other arts, and yet be a long hop, skip and delusional way from it. — Norman Corwin