200 of the best photography quotes from the best photographers in the world!
Photography is an art and like any other form of art, there are a few artist who have inspired everyone with their revolutionary work and quotes. But in order to find out what motivated these photographers, artists and actors, I have collected a few quotes of these inspirational and talented photographers. Hopefully it will motivate you as well to produce your own most authentic and creative work.
“What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.”– Karl Lagerfeld
“If you can smell the street by looking at the photo, it’s a street photograph.” — Bruce Gilden
“In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.” – August Sander
“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
“A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth. ” ― Richard Avedon
“Only photography has been able to divide human life into a series of moments, each of them has the value of a complete existence.” - Eadweard Muybridge
There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.” – Ansel Adams
The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.” – Andy Warhol
The pictures are there, and you just take them.” – Robert Capa
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
“A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.” – Dorothea Lange
“A tear contains an ocean. A photographer is aware of the tiny moments in a person’s life that reveal greater truths.” – Anon
“I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.”— Diane Arbus
These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on old dry plates of sixty years ago... I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. Any they in turn seem to be aware of me.– Ansel Adams
“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
“The two most engaging powers of a photograph are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.” – William Thackeray
For me, documentary photography has always come with great responsibility. Not just to tell the story honestly and with empathy, but also to make sure the right people hear it. When you photograph somebody who is in pain or discomfort, they trust you to make sure the images will act as their advocate.” – Giles Duley
“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
When people ask me what equipment I use – I tell them my eyes.” – Anonymous
“I’ve always believed that photography is a way to shape human perception.” – James Balog
“In a world and a life that moves so fast, photography just makes the sound go out and it makes you stop and take a pause. Photography calms me.” – Drew Barrymore
In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv. – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Always seeing something, never seeing nothing, being photographer” ― Walter De Mulder
“What do we feel when we look at a good photograph? We just want to be there, right at the exact moment that photo taken!” - Mehmet Murat Ildan
“Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.” – Cecil Beaton
“Of course I realize that photography is not the technical facility as much as it is the eye, and this decision that one makes for the moment at which you are going to snap, you know.” – Ben Shahn
“If you see something that moves you, and then snap it, you keep a moment.” – Linda McCartney
Photography is not about cameras, gadgets and gizmos. Photography is about photographers. A camera didn’t make a great picture any more than a typewriter wrote a great novel.” – Peter Adams
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
Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.” – Paul Strand
“There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.” – Robert Frank
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
You cannot possibly hit the shutter without leaving a piece of you in the image.” – Joe Buissink
When you photograph a face… you photograph the soul behind it.” – Jean-Luc Godard
“In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.” – Alfred Stieglitz
“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
“A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.” – Eudora Welty
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 eye should learn to listen before it looks.”– Robert Frank
“I am not interested in shooting new things – I am interested to see things new.”– Ernst Haas
Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.” – Yousuf Karsh
I walk, I look, I see, I stop, I photograph.” – Leon Levinstein
“A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.” ― Ansel Adams
“For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.” ― Henri Cartier-Bresson
"It's not enough to just own a camera. Everyone owns a camera. To be a photographer, you must understand, appreciate, and harness the power you hold!" – Mark Denman
“A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they’ll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won’t do a thing for you if you don’t have anything in your head or in your heart.” – Arnold Newman
“Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.” – Marc Riboud
“There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.” – Ansel Adams
“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 is the story I fail to put into words.” – Destin Sparks
“It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down....” ― Kate Morton
"For me, the camera is a sketchbook, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity." – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“I don’t think there’s any such thing as teaching people photography, other than influencing them a little. People have to be their own learners. They have to have a certain talent.” – Imogen Cunningham
“I don’t trust words. I trust pictures.” – Gilles Peress
“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” – Ansel Adams
“I think that emotional content is an image’s most important element, regardless of the photographic technique. Much of the work I see these days lacks the emotional impact to draw a reaction from viewers, or remain in their hearts.” – Anne Geddes
“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.” – Ansel Adams
“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
“For me, every photograph is a portrait; the clothes are just a vehicle for what I want to say. You're photographing a relationship with the person you're shooting; there's an exchange, and that's what that picture is. “ – Peter Lindbergh
“The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.” – Andy Warhol
“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
“A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.” – Ansel Adams
“Which of my photographs is my favourite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.” – Imogen Cunningham
“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
“To the complaint, 'There are no people in these photographs,' I respond, There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.” ― Ansel Adams
"A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into." – Ansel Adams
“As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs.” – Sam Abell
“Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.” – Diane Arbus
“If your pictures are not good enough you are not close enough.” – Robert Capa
“Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.” ― Ansel Adams
“A good photograph is knowing where to stand.” ― Ansel Adams
“Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real.” – Ansel Adams
“We are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us.” ― Ralph Hattersley
“There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” ― Ansel Adams
“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
“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 extraordinary.” – David Bailey
“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
“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” ― Susan Sontag
"The painter constructs, the photographer discloses." - Susan Sontag
“There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“How do we start taking pictures of people, and stop taking pictures of poses?” – Justin and Mary Marantz
“Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.” – David Alan Harvey
“Photography is a love affair with life.” – Burk Uzzle
“Taking an image, freezing a moment, reveals how rich reality truly is.” – Anon
“A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.” — Annie Leibovitz
“Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter. “ — Ansel Adams
“Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.” — Duane Michals
“My photography is the result of being there at the right moment.” – Rene Burri
“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
“The Earth is Art, The Photographer is only a Witness ” ― Yann Arthus-Bertrand
"That frame of mind that you need to make fine pictures of a very wonderful subject; you cannot do it by not being lost yourself." - Dorothea Lange
“There’s a time when people say your work is revolutionary, but you have to keep being revolutionary. 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
“With creating, we are literally bringing something into existence that didn’t exist before.” – Montana Dennis
“I walk, I look, I see, I stop, I photograph.” – Leon Levinstein
“Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell.” ― Kim Edwards
"The context in which a photograph is seen affects the meaning the viewer draws from it." ― Stephen Shore
“Photography is the beauty of life captured.” ― Tara Chisolm
“To me, it is better to ‘guess’ at how something works, experiment, fail, guess again, fail, and keep repeating that process over and over again until you either figure it out or you discover a multiplicity of other cool tricks along the way.” – Trey Ratcliff
“Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.” – Peter Adams
“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
“You don’t take a photograph. You ask quietly to borrow it.” – Anon
“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
Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs. — Ansel Adams
“In the world of photography, you get to share a captured moment with other people.” —James Wilson
“The two most engaging powers of a photograph are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.” – William Thackeray
“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
"Photographs are just light and time." ― Aza Holmes
“A camera is a SAVE button for the mind’s eye.” ― Roger Kingston
“Photography helps people to see.” ― Berenice Abbott
“A landscape image cuts across all political and national boundaries, it transcends the constraints of language and culture.” ― Charlie Waite
“A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.” – Edward Steichen
“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, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.” ― Ansel Adams
“Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn’t look like somebody else’s work.” — William Klein
“My photography is the result of being there at the right moment.” – Rene Burri
“Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.” ― Henri Cartier-Bresson
“A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.” ― Salman Rushdie
"The way that light hits objects, I think, is one of the more important things that sculpture and photography share." - Rashid Johnson
“Creativity needs to extend beyond the lens. Find creative ways to showcase your work and get it seen. Straight up tenacity, hard work and determination will always be part of the equation, so get to it.” – Jimmy Chin
“When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear.” – Alfred Eisenstaedt
“Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.” – Dorothea Lange
“The picture that you took with your camera is the imagination you want to create with reality.” – Scott Lorenzo
“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
“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
“If I saw something in my viewfinder that looked familiar to me, I would do something to shake it up.” – Garry Winogrand
“Circumstantial light considers not only all the properties and behaviors of natural light, but also how that light interacts with the objects around [you], so that [you] can transform those objects into light-shaping tools.” – Roberto Valenzuela
“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
“Essentially what photography is is life lit up.”– Sam Abell
“Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.” — Ambrose Bierce
“These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on old dry plates of sixty years ago... I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. Any they in turn seem to be aware of me.” — Ansel Adams
“If you photograph for a long time, you get to understand such things as body language. I often do not look at people I photograph, especially afterwards. Also when I want a photo, I become somewhat fearless, and this helps a lot. There will always be someone who objects to being photographed, and when this happens you move on.” — Martin Parr
“There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph.” – Robert Heinecken
“I began to realize that 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
“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
"Photography, to me, is catching a moment which is passing, and which is true." - Jacques-Henri Lartigue
“Allow yourself the freedom to step away from perfection because it is only then that you can find success.” – Chase Jarvis
“When [you] acquire an understanding of the science behind light and what governs it, then [you] can predict its behavior and control the lighting in [your] photographs.” – Roberto Valenzuela
“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
“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 is truth.” — Jean-Luc Godard
“To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces and record the qualities of nature and humanity which live or are latent in all things.”— Ansel Adams
“To me, photography must suggest, not insist or explain.” — Brassai
“In a world and a life that moves so fast, photography just makes the sound go out and it makes you stop and take a pause. Photography calms me.” – Drew Barrymore
“Photography has no rules, it is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it is achieved.” - Bill Brandt
“Above all, life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference” ― Robert Frank
"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
“I believe photographers should shoot what they want, not shoot what they get.” – Roberto Valenzuela
“I like to photograph anyone before they know what their best angles are.” - Ellen Von Unwerth
“My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, or the camera’s eye may entirely change my idea.” – Edward Weston
“There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.” — Ansel Adams
“In my mind's eye, I visualize how a particular... sight and feeling will appear on a print. If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice.” — Ansel Adams
“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
“There is no question that photography has played a major role in the environmental movement.” – Galen Rowell
“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
“A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you.” ― Brigitte Bardot
"When a moment in front of me appears to be particularly special, whether it be by beauty or experience, I capture it. I usually find a reason to justify taking that photo - symmetry, or color or contrast - and it's my hope that my photography sheds light onto what I see and do on a daily basis." - Connor Franta
“I think all art is about control – the encounter between control and the uncontrollable.” – Richard Avedon
“You might be a photographer if… Your eyesight from staring at the computer has gone from F11 to F1.8.” – Naman Pokarna
“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 human comedy.” – Elliott Erwitt
“To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” — Diane Arbus
“Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.” — Ansel Adams
“If you are out there shooting, things will happen for you. If you’re not out there, you’ll only hear about it.” — Jay Maisel
“I’ll always be an amateur photographer.” — Elliott Erwitt
“The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.” ― Elliott Erwitt
"The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer." - Steven Pinker
“I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.” – Ken Burns
“Black and white are the colors of photography. To me they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected.” – Robert Frank
“My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.” – Helmut Newton
“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
“When I'm ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my minds eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I'm interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.” – Ansel Adams
“A camera alone does not make a picture. To make a picture you need a camera, a photographer and above all a subject. It is the subject that determines the interest of the photograph.” — Man Ray
“I can get obsessed by anything if I look at it long enough. That’s the curse of being a photographer.” — Irving Penn
“To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.” ― Henri Cartier-Bresson
"My interest in photography is not to capture an image I see or even have in my mind, but to explore the potential of moments I can only begin to imagine." - Lois Greenfield
“Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.” – Berenice Abbott
“The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?” – Edward Weston
“To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition in a fraction of a second of the significance of an event.” ― Henri Cartier-Bresson
“When you photograph a face . . .you photograph the soul behind it.” – Jean-Luc Godard
“Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.” — Matt Hardy
“Some photographers take reality... and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation.” — Ansel Adams
“What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.” — John Berger
“Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper. The photographer begins with the finished product.” — Edward Steichen
“A photograph shouldn't be just a picture, it should be a philosophy.” ― Amit Kalantri
"Every viewer is going to get a different thing. That's the thing about painting, photography, cinema." – David Lynch
“I think good dreaming is what leads to good photographs.” – Wayne Miller
“Part of the role of photography is to exaggerate, and that is an aspect that I have to puncture. I do that by showing the world as I really find it.” – Martin Parr
“Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask ‘how’, while others of a more curious nature will ask ‘why’. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.” – Martin Parr
“If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera.” – Lewis Hine
“I never have taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse.” — Diane Arbus
“We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium.” — Ansel Adams
“The golden rule is work fast. As for framing, composition, focus – this is no time to start asking yourself questions: you just have to trust your intuition and the sharpness of your reflexes.” — Jacques-Henri Lartigue
“The subject matter is so much more important than the photographer.” — Gordon Parks
“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”― Susan Sontag
"One advantage of photography is that it's visual and can transcend language." - Lisa Kristine
“The more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
“A photograph is like a recipe memory the finished dish.” – Carrie Latet
“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
“All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.” – Richard Avedon
“The artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.” – Paul Strand
