Photography quotes for you to Tweet…
These aren’t my quotes — they’re a collection of the words of wisdom I’ve collected over the years from some of the greatest photographers. If there are any errors on this page or you’d like to offer a quote to add to it, please tweet me, @theLightMatters, and let me know 🙂
Photography is the story I fail to put into words -- Destin Sparks #photography #quote Share on X When words are unclear, I shall focus with pictures. When images are inadequate, I'll be content with silence -- Ansel Adams #photography #quote Share on X When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear #photography #quote Share on X In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality -- Alfred Stieglitz #photography #quote Share on X Wherever there is light, one can photograph -- Alfred Stieglitz #photography #quote Share on X There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment -- Robert Frank #photography #quote Share on X Taking an image, freezing a moment, reveals how rich reality truly is #photography #quote Share on X Photography is a way of feeling, touching, loving. What you've caught on film is captured forever -- Aaron Siskind #photography #quote Share on X We make photographs to understand what our lives mean to us -- Ralph Hattersley #photography #quote Share on X A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people -- Annie Leibovitz #photography #quote Share on X What makes #photography a strange invention is that its primary ingredients are light and time -- John Berger #quote Share on X You don’t take a photograph. You ask quietly to borrow it #photography #quote Share on X 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 #photography #quote Share on X A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it -- Edward Steichen #photography #quote Share on X It’s one thing to make a picture of what a person looks like, it’s another thing to make a portrait of who they are -- Paul Caponigro #photography #quote Share on X The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do -- Andy Warhol #photography #quote Share on X Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies -- Diane Arbus #photography #quote Share on X Photographs open a door into the past, but they also allow a look at the future -- Sally Mann #photography #quote Share on X To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them -- Elliott Erwitt #photography #quote Share on X The picture you took with your camera is the imagination you want to create with reality -- Scott Lorenzo #photography #quote Share on X If the photographer is interested in the people in front of his lens, and if he is compassionate, it’s already a lot. The instrument is not the camera but the photographer -- Eve Arnold #photography #quote Share on X A tear contains an ocean. A photographer is aware of the tiny moments in a persons life that reveal greater truths #photography #quote Share on X Photography has nothing to do with cameras -- Lucas Gentry #photography #quote Share on X The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera -- Dorothea Lange #photography #quote Share on X Essentially what photography is, is life lit up -- Sam Abell #photography #quote Share on X I don’t trust words. I trust pictures -- Gilles Peress #photography #quote Share on X I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them -- Diane Arbus #photography #quote Share on X Taking pictures is savouring life intensely, every hundredth of a second -- Marc Riboud #photography #quote Share on X Once you learn to care, you can record images with your mind or on film. There is no difference between the two #photography #quote Share on X Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art -- Ambrose Bierce #photography #quote Share on X Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second -- Jean-Luc Godard #photography #quote Share on X Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still -- Dorothea Lange #photography #quote Share on X The camera makes you forget you’re there. It’s not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much -- Annie Leibovitz #photography #quote Share on X If you see something that moves you, and then snap it, you keep a moment -- Linda McCartney #photography #quote Share on X There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer -- Ansel Adams #photography #quote Share on X A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know -- Diane Arbus #photography #quote Share on X The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words -- Elliott Erwitt #photography #quote Share on X One doesn’t stop seeing. One doesn’t stop framing. It doesn’t turn off and turn on. It’s on all the time -- Annie Leibovitz #photography #quote Share on X What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce -- Karl Lagerfeld #photography #quote Share on X No place is boring if you've had a good night's sleep and a pocketful of unexposed film -- Robert Adams #photography #quote Share on X A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective -- Irving Penn #photography #quote Share on X Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph -- Matt Hardy #photography #quote Share on X Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty separates a snapshot from a photograph -- Matt Hardy #photography #quote Share on X You don’t take a photograph, you make it -- Ansel Adams #photography #quote Share on X When people ask me what equipment I use – I tell them my eyes #photography #quote Share on X I wish that all of nature’s magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed -- Annie Leibovitz #photography #quote Share on X I never have taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse -- Diane Arbus #photography #quote Share on X All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth -- Richard Avedon #photography #quote Share on X Today everything exists to end in a photograph -- Susan Sontag #photography #quote Share on X I think good dreaming is what leads to good photographs -- Wayne Miller #photography #quote Share on X You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life -- Joan Miro #photography #quote Share on X I love the people I photograph. I mean, they’re my friends. I’ve never met most of them or I don’t know them at all, yet through my images I live with them -- Bruce Gilden #photography #quote Share on X If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff -- Jim Richardson #photography #quote Share on X When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I’d like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph -- Annie Leibovitz #photography #quote Share on X My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport -- Steve McCurry #photography #quote Share on X Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera -- Yousuf Karsh #photography #quote Share on X Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst -- Henri Cartier-Bresson #photography #quote Share on X The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don’t belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation -- Susan Meiselas #photography #quote Share on X Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure -- Tony Benn #photography #quote Share on X It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter -- Alfred Eisenstaedt #photography #quote Share on X I like to photograph anyone before they know what their best angles are -- Ellen Von Unwerth #photography #quote Share on X Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field -- Peter Adams #photography #quote Share on X Life is like a camera. Just focus on what’s important and capture the good times, develop from the negatives and if things don’t work out, just take another shot #photography #quote Share on X If I could tell the story with words, I wouldn't need to lug around a camera -- Lewis Hine #photography #quote Share on X Only photograph what you love -- Tim Walker #photography #quote Share on X In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated -- August Sander #photography #quote Share on X When I photograph, what I’m really doing is seeking answers to things -- Wynn Bullock #photography #quote Share on X Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness -- Yousuf Karsh #photography #quote Share on X It’s weird that photographers spend years or even a whole lifetime, trying to capture moments that added together, don’t even amount to a couple of hours -- James Lalropui Keivom #photography #quote Share on X Once photography enters your bloodstream, it is like a disease #photography #quote Share on X Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow -- Imogen Cunningham #photography #quote Share on X You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved -- Ansel Adams #photography #quote Share on X There are no bad pictures; that's just how your face looks sometimes -- Abraham Lincoln #photography #quote Share on X 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 #photography #quote Share on X All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt --… Share on X A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away -- Eudora Welty #photography #quote Share on X There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer -- Ansel Adams #photography #quote Share on X Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down -- Kate Morton #photography #quote Share on X A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed -- Ansel Adams #photography #quote Share on X For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity -- Henri Cartier-Bressons #photography #quote Share on X When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice -- Robert Frank #photography #quote Share on X There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs -- Ansel Adams #photography #quote Share on X The Earth is art, the photographer is only a witness -- Yann Arthus-Bertrand #photography #quote Share on X Sometimes I arrive just when God's ready to have someone click the shutter -- Ansel Adams #photography #quote Share on X Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop -- Ansel Adams #photography #quote Share on X There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept -- Ansel Adams #photography #quote Share on X A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second -- Salman Rushdie #photography #quote Share on X The eye should learn to listen before it looks -- Robert Frank #photography #quote Share on X A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity -- George Bernard Shaw #photography #quote Share on X Always seeing something, never seeing nothing, being a photographer -- Walter De Mulder #photography #quote Share on X 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 -- Aleksander Hermon #photography #quote Share on X To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun,… Share on X Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell -- Kim Edwards #photography #quote Share on X To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy -- Henri Cartier-Bresson #photography #quote Share on X People spot a big black lens, and they worry about what they're doing, or how their hair looks. Nobody see the person holding the camera -- Erika O'Rourke #photography #quote Share on X The painter constructs, the photographer discloses -- Susan Sontag #photography #quote Share on X Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment -- Ansel Adams #photography #quote Share on X To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart -- Henri Cartier-Bresson #photography #quote Share on X Photographers tend not to photograph what they can’t see, which is the very reason one should try to attempt it -- Duane Michals #photography #quote Share on X What's really important is to simplify. The work of most photographers would be improved immensely if they could do one thing: get rid of the extraneous. If you strive for simplicity, you are more likely to reach the viewer -- William Albert Allard… Share on X Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs -- Ansel Adams #photography #quote Share on X A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into -- Ansel Adams #photography #quote Share on X To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk -- Edward Weston #photography #quote Share on X I tend to think of the act of photographing as an adventure. My favourite thing is to go where I’ve never been -- Diane Arbus #photography #quote Share on X Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location -- Joe McNally #photography #quote Share on X A photograph shouldn't be just a picture, it should be a philosophy -- Amit Kalantri #photography #quote Share on X A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you -- Brigitte Bardot #photography #quote Share on X It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us -- Henri Cartier-Bresson #photography #quote Share on X The best images are the ones that retain their strength and impact over the years, regardless of the number of times they are viewed -- Anne Geddes #photography #quote Share on X Emotional content is an image’s most important element, regardless of the photographic technique -- Anne Geddes #photography #quote Share on X The camera makes you forget you’re there. It’s not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much -- Annie Leibovitz #photography #quote Share on X A good photograph is knowing where to stand -- Ansel Adams #photography #quote Share on X The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it -- Ansel Adams #photography #quote Share on X The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score and the print the performance -- Ansel Adams #photography #quote Share on X A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is, thereby, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety -- Ansel Adams #photography #quote Share on X Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real -- Ansel Adams #photography #quote Share on X Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art -- Ansel Adams #photography #quote Share on X Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment -- Ansel Adams #photography #quote Share on X It is my intention to present - through the medium of photography - intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators -- Ansel Adams #photography #quote Share on X Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution -- Ansel Adams #photography #quote Share on X Photography helps people to see -- Berenice Abbott #photography #quote Share on X Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past -- Berenice Abbott #photography #quote Share on X Photography is a love affair with life -- Burk Uzzle #photography #quote Share on X A landscape image cuts across all political and national boundaries, it transcends the constraints of language and culture -- Charlie Waite #photography #quote Share on X Photographing a culture in the here and now often means photographing the intersection of the present with the past -- David DuChemin #photography #quote Share on X 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 #photography #quote Share on X One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind -- Dorothea Lange #photography #quote Share on X To know ahead of time what you’re looking for means you’re then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting, and often false -- Dorothea Lange #photography #quote Share on X To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them -- Eliott Erwitt #photography #quote Share on X It’s about reacting to what you see, hopefully without preconception. You can find pictures anywhere. It’s simply a matter of noticing things and organising them. You just have to care about what’s around you and have a concern with humanity and the… Share on X You can find pictures anywhere. It’s simply a matter of noticing things and organising them -- Eliott Erwitt #photography #quote Share on X The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words -- Eliott Erwitt #photography #quote Share on X I am not interested in shooting new things – I am interested to see things new -- Ernst Haas #photography #quote Share on X 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 #photography #quote Share on X If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument -- Eve Arnold #photography #quote Share on X My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain -- Helmut Newton #photography #quote Share on X #Beauty is in the eye of the retoucher -- #photography #quote Share on X The photograph itself doesn’t interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality -- Henri Cartier-Bresson #photography #quote Share on X To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition in a fraction of a second of the significance of an event -- Henri Cartier-Bresson #photography #quote Share on X To photograph is to hold one’s breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy -- Henri Cartier-Bresson #photography #quote Share on X 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 #quote Share on X 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 #quote Share on X In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv -- Henri Cartier-Bresson #photography #quote Share on X Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation -- Henri Cartier-Bresson #photography #quote Share on X Which of my photographs is my favourite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow -- Imogen Cunningham #photography #quote Share on X There will always be those who look only at technique, who ask ‘how’, while others of a more curious nature will ask ‘why' -- Man Ray #photography #quote Share on X With photography, I like to create a fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society’s natural prejudice and giving this a twist -- Martin Parr #photography #quote Share on X It’s one thing to make a picture of what a person looks like, it’s another thing to make a portrait of who they are -- Paul Caponigro #photography #quote Share on X We are there with our cameras to record reality. Once we start modifying that which exists, we are robbing photography of its most valuable attribute -- Philip Jones Griffiths #photography #quote Share on X There’s a time when people say your work is revolutionary, but you have to keep being revolutionary -- Rankin #photography #quote Share on X I can’t keep shooting pop stars all my life. You have to keep changing, keep pushing yourself, looking for the new, the unusual -- Rankin #photography #quote Share on X If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough -- Robert Capa #photography #quote Share on X The pictures are there, and you just take them -- Robert Capa #photography #quote Share on X The more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer -- Robert Mapplethorpe #photography #quote Share on X Photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future -- Sally Mann #photography #quote Share on X I think life is too short not to be doing something which you really believe in -- Steve McCurry #photography #quote Share on X Only photograph what you love -- Tim Walker #photography #quote Share on X Photography is a small voice, at best, but sometimes one photograph, or a group of them, can lure our sense of awareness -- W Eugene Smith #photography #quote Share on X Did I express my personality? I think that's quite unimportant because it's not people's selves but what they have to say about life that's important -- Paul Strand #photography #quote Share on X The important thing is, you have to have something important to say about the world -- Paul Strand #photography #quote Share on X Every artist I suppose has a sense of what they think has been the importance of their work. But to ask them to define it is not really a fair question. My real answer would be, the answer is on the wallt -- Paul Strand #photography #quote Share on X Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees -- Paul Strand #photography #quote Share on X It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness -- Paul Strand #photography #quote Share on X The camera sees the world differently than the human eye and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed -- Galen Rowell #photography #quote Share on X Buying a Nikon doesn't make you a photographer. It makes you a Nikon owner #photography #quote Share on X The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh -- Edward Weston #photography #quote Share on X The two most engaging powers of a photograph are to make new things familiar and familiar things new -- William Thackeray #photography #quote Share on X The more you photograph, the more you realize what can and what can't be photographed. You just have to keep doing it -- Eliot Porter #photography #quote Share on X When you photograph a face . . .you photograph the soul behind it -- Jean-Luc Godard #photography #quote Share on X The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world -- Orson Welles #photography #quote Share on X Kodak sells film, but they don't advertise film; they advertise memories -- Theodore Levitt #photography #quote Share on X The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it? -- Edward Weston #photography #quote Share on X Photography has no rules, it is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it is achieved -- Bill Brandt #photography #quote Share on X Photography is the art of frozen time... the ability to store emotion and feelings within a frame -- #photography #quote Share on X Results are uncertain even among the more experienced photographers -- Matthew Brady #photography #quote Share on X Photography is the recording of strangeness and beauty with beguiling precision -- Sebastian Smeey #photography #quote Share on X Photography is (a means by which we)...learn to see the ordinary -- David Bailey #photography #quote Share on X Photography is a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing. The contest can be held anywhere -- John Szarkowski #photography #quote Share on X Photography is a strong tool, a propaganda device, and a weapon for the defense of the environment...and therefore for the fostering of a healthy human race and even very likely for its survival -- Eliot Porter #photography #quote Share on X I threw myself into this artform because photography had given me a new sense of mission and identity -- Bob Anderson #photography #quote Share on X Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be -- Duane Michals #photography #quote Share on X Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world -- Arnold Newman #photography #quote Share on X Art is the highest task and the proper metaphysical activity of this life -- Friedrich Nietzsche #photography #quote Share on X Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography -- George Eastman #photography #quote Share on X Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light -- George Eastman #photography #quote Share on X The difference between #photography and #videography? Time. One expands it, the other compresses it #quote Share on X It doesn't matter how much equipment you have, if you're not making pictures, you're not a #photographer #quote Share on X
