I believe that good photographs can communicate things that words cannot. It can provide insight or context into a situation. Photographs can make people feel differently, which is why I think they are very important in the world.
Photography’s most unique attribute is the ability to represent visual reality over time. Photography can be used to tell stories but also to capture moments of time and preserve them… or to present an idea and inspire others. All these things have led to the importance of quotes about photography.
Here are 200+ Inspiring Photography Quotes From The Legendary Photography Brains
“Great photography is about the depth of feeling, not the depth of field.”
– Peter Adams
“Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.”
– Marc Riboud
“When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear.”
– Alfred Eisenstaedt
“With creating, we are literally bringing something into existence that didn’t exist before.”
– Montana Dennis
“I believe photographers should shoot what they want, not shoot what they get.”
– Roberto Valenzuela
“The earth is art, the photographer is only a witness.”
– Yann Arthus-Bertrand
“Wherever there is light, one can photograph.”
– Alfred Stieglitz
“Photography has no rules, it is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it is achieved.”
– Bill Brandt
“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
“The best zoom lens is your legs.”
~Ernst Hass
“Photography is the story I fail to put into words”
~Destin Sparks
“It’s not just a photograph, It’s all about capturing a moment”
~Hani Shah
“We take photos as a return ticket to a moment otherwise gone”
~Anonymous
“What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.”
― Karl Lagerfeld
“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”
― Ansel Adams
“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
“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.”
― Susan Sontag
“Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.”
― Marc Riboud
“A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.”
― Eudora Welty
“A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.”
― Eudora Welty
“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
“I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost.”
― Nan Goldin
“There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.”
― Ansel Adams
“A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.”
― George Bernard Shaw
“People spot a big black lens, and they worry about what they’re doing, or how their hair looks. Nobody sees the person holding the camera.”
― Erica O’Rourke
“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 a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.”
― Alfred Stieglitz
“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”
― Susan Sontag
“Above all, life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference”
― Robert Frank
“The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.”
― Elliott Erwitt
“To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.”
― Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Photographs are just light and time,”
― John Green
“It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.”
― Dorothea Lange
“The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.”
― Roland Barthes
“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
“It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us.”
― Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Women that can work a camera with ease often work men just as effortlessly for both require the same commitment to vanity and manipulation.”
― Tiffany Madison
“I know the best moments can never be captured on film, even as I spend nearly half my life trying to do just that.”
― Rosie O’Donnell
“Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.”
― Susan Sontag
“Sharpness is a bourgeois concept”
― Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Photography is a magical kind of art that allows people to preserve time and moments, and to describe the world the way they see it.”
― Sahara Sanders
“We all perform. It’s what we do for each other all the time, deliberately or unintentionally. It’s a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognized as what we’d like to be.–PERFORMANCE”
― Richard Avedon
“For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.”
― diane arbus
“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
“Pictures could not be accessories to the story — evidence — they had to contain the story within the frame; the best picture contained a whole war within one frame.”
― Tatjana Soli
“Photography is simultaneously and instantaneously the recognition of a fact and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that express and signify that fact”
― Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Just because you can, doesn’t necessarily mean that you should!”
― Bill Collins
“I used to have a theory about photographing. It was a sense of getting in between two actions, or in between acton and repose.”
― Diane Arbus
“We observe few objects really closely. As we walk on the earth, we observe the external events at two or three arms’ lengths. If we ride a horse or drive in an automobile, we are further separated from the immediate surround. We see and photograph “scenery”; our vast world is inadequately described as the “landscape.” The most intimate object perceived daily is usually the printed page. The small and commonplace are rarely explored.”
― Ansel Adams
“Find the light of beauty even in the shadows of darkness.”
― Christina Casino
When do I see a photograph, when a reflection?”
― Philip K. Dick
“The context in which a photograph is seen affects the meaning the viewer draws from it.”
― Stephen Shore,
“A professional headshot in front of a bookshelf says you’re an intellectual. A professional headshot peeking though a bookshelf says you’re probably under a restraining order.”
― Ryan Lilly
“Photography is without mercy–though it’s nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat’s meat men.”
― Nick Harkaway
“The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.”
― Susan Sontag
“It is by studium that I am interested in so many photographs, whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them as good historical scenes: for it is culturally (this connotation is present in studium) that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions.”
― Roland Barthes
“There’s something about photography I love — a whole memory caught in a moment.”
― Rebecca Serle
“Most tourists see way less of the places they visit than their cameras.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“No Trespassing’ actually means ‘Best views this way’.”
― Rip Pereida
“Change Your Perspective, Inspire the World”
― Jeremy Janus
“The beauty of the subject often deceives us into thinking that someone is a great photographer.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“Family pictures are emotionally charged markers, the cheerful gang tags of the reasonably happy and domesticated.”
― J.L. Bryan
“Every Ukrainian photographer dreams to take a photo which will stop the war.”
― Maks Levin
“What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are time and light.”
— John Berger
“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
“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
“Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.”
— Peter Adams
“A good photograph is knowing where to stand.”
— Ansel Adams
“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 takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.”
– Dorothea Lange
“Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.”— Yousuf Karsh
“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” — Dorothea Lange
“Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.”– Duane Michals
“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
“Photographs don’t discriminate between the living and the dead. In the fragments of time and shards of light that compose them, everyone is equal. Now you see us; now you don’t. It doesn’t matter whether you look through a camera lens and press the shutter. It doesn’t even matter whether you open your eyes or close them. The pictures are always there. And so are the people in them.”
― Robert Goddard
“People, there’s no such thing as, THE BEST CAMERA BRAND, but yes there will always be THE BEST CAMERA AT ANY GIVEN TIME. Technology will change, but not art.”
― Ashraf Saharudin
“As a young person, and I know it’s hard to believe that I was shy, but you could take your camera, and it would take you to places: it was like having a friend, like having someone to go out with and look at the world. I would do things with a camera I wouldn’t do normally if I was just by myself.”
― Annie Leibovitz
“Embracing the Light
Collected bits of truth
Shimmering sparks
Shards of light
Merge
Healing
Restoring
Bursting Bright
Rising
in divine ecstatic flame.”
― Leonard Nimoy
“By shooting the darkest areas three zones lighter, you turned a black, lifeless max lack zone 0 into a zone 3. I think, in life, most of us did this all the time.”
― A.S. King
“Photography is never real, it’s merely one of many ways of telling the truth.”
― John Thai
“A photograph is the pause button on life.”
― Ty Holland
“The horizon is the fine line between golden hour and blue hour.”
― Destin Sparks
“Not every artistic person should have to be a photographer, but every photographer should be artistic.”
― Pradeepa Pandiyan
“Photographic projects can be as short as an afternoon or as long as a lifetime.”
― George Barr
“When I make a picture, I make love.”
― Alfred Stieglitz
“If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.”
― Susan Sontag
