When photography was invented it was thought to be an equivalent to truth, it was truth with a capital “T”.
Vicki Goldberg
My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.
Richard Avedon
You don’t take a photograph. You ask, quietly, to borrow it.
Sometimes I do get to places just when God’s ready to have somebody click the shutter.
Ansel Adams
Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.
Ambrose Bierce
The departure of our boys to foreign parts with the ever-present possibility that they might never return, taught the real value of photography to every father and mother. To many a mother the photograph of her boy in his country’s uniform was the one never-failing consolation.
Louis Fabian Bachrach
No place is boring, if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.
Robert Adams
I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do — that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.
Diane Arbus
Often while traveling with a camera we arrive just as the sun slips over the horizon of a moment, too late to expose film, only time enough to expose our hearts.
Minor White
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
Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.
Ansel Adams
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
I think a photography class should be a requirement in all educational programs because it makes you see the world rather than just look at it.
There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.
Ansel Adams
To manipulate an image is to control a people
Carolyn Gerard
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
The world just does not fit conveniently into the format of a 35mm camera.
W. Eugene Smith
When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.
Ansel Adams
When you photograph people in colour you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in B&W, you photograph their souls!
Ted Grant
A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.
Eudora Welty
A photograph is usually looked at – seldom looked into.
Ansel Adams
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
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
The camera can photograph thought.
Dirk Bogarde
Perishability in a photograph is important in a picture. If a photograph looks perishable we say, “Gee, I’m glad I have that moment.”
John Loengard
Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.
Dorothea Lange
It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary.
David Bailey
To manipulate an image is to control a people
Carolyn Gerard
There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.
Ansel Adams
Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.
Berenice Abbott
I just think it’s important to be direct and honest with people about why you’re photographing them and what you’re doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul.
Mary Ellen Mark
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
No photographer is as good as the simplest camera.
Edward Steichen
Every time someone tells me how sharp my photos are, I assume that it isn’t a very interesting photograph. If it were, they would have more to say.
I love the medium of photography, for with its unique realism it gives me the power to go beyond conventional ways of seeing and understanding and say, “This is real, too.”
Wynn Bullock
I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.
John Steinbeck
Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever… it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.
Aaron Siskind
The goal is not to change your subjects, but for the subject to change the photographer.
A photograph is memory in the raw.
Carrie Latet
Photography is truth. And cinema is truth twenty-four times a second.
Jean-Luc Godard
The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.
Brooks Anderson
Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man.
Edward Steichen
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
Fear is a darkroom where negatives develop.
Usman B. Asif
Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.
Berenice Abbott
The camera cannot lie, but it can be an accessory to untruth.
Harold Evans
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
You don’t take a photograph, you make it.
Ansel Adams
In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
Dorthea Lange
There will be times when you will be in the field without a camera. And, you will see the most glorious sunset or the most beautiful scene that you have ever witnessed. Don’t be bitter because you can’t record it. Sit down, drink it in, and enjoy it for what it is!
DeGriff
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
If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.
James Mcneill Whistler
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
I never question what to do, it tells me what to do. The photographs make themselves with my help.
Ruth Bernhard
The negative is the equivalent of the composer’s score, and the print the performance.
Ansel Adams
A Ming vase can be well-designed and well-made and is beautiful for that reason alone. I don’t think this can be true for photography. Unless there is something a little incomplete and a little strange, it will simply look like a copy of something pretty. We won’t take an interest in it.
John Loengard
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
A photograph is like the recipe – a memory the finished dish.
Carrie Latet
Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man.
Edward Steichen
The photograph itself doesn’t interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.
Henri Cartier Bresson
Everyone has a photographic memory, but not everyone has film.
The Quotesjunction.com
All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this – as in other ways – they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.
John Berger
One photo out of focus is a mistake, ten photo out of focus are an experimentation, one hundred photo out of focus are a style.
A picture is worth a thousand words; a slide show is both.
The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.
Henri Cartier Bresson
Photographs that transcend but do not deny their literal situation appeal to me.
Sam Abbel
I didn’t want to tell the tree or weed what it was. I wanted it to tell me something and through me express its meaning in nature.
Wynn Bullock
I think the best pictures are often on the edges of any situation, I don’t find photographing the situation nearly as interesting as photographing the edges.
William Albert Allard
Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.
Duane Michals
If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera.
Lewis Hine
All photos are accurate. None of them is the truth.
Richard Avedon
Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Buying a Nikon doesn’t make you a photographer. It makes you a Nikon owner.