On Photography Quotes

A lot of the photography I'm doing and thinking about is directed at Instagram.

Photography is simply a function of noticing things.

The purpose of photography is to create an emotion about the world through what has been carefully seen and selected.

To me photography can be simultaneously a record and a mirror or window of self-expression.

The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.

We could teach photography as a way to make a living, and best of all, somehow to get students to experience for themselves photography as a way of life.

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

Let us... leave art to the artists, and let us try to use the medium of photography to create photographs that can endure because of their photographic qualities.

No photographer is as good as the simplest camera.

Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

If you view your life as a piece of fabric or a tapestry, the photography is the stitching. It keeps everything together.

I would strongly encourage anybody embarking on photography as a career to embrace and enjoy the whole process. Being a photographer can be a wonderful way to experience the world.

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.

Street Photography is like fishing. Catching the fish is more exciting than eating it.

I have always found photography magical, and became more taken with it whilst modeling.

It's neither our culture nor our race which interconnects us. It's Street Photography.

It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.

In many ways, unexpected results are what have most inspired my photography.

You don't make a photograph just with a camera

The ‘machine-gun’ approach to photography – by which many negatives are made with the hope that one will be good – is fatal to serious results.

A photograph is neither taken or seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.

Main thing is just to remember that hard work got me here and only hard work will keep me here.

I was a make believe ethnographer: treating New Yorkers like an explorer would treat Zulus - searching for the rawest snapshot, the zero degree of photography.

Photography is a generous medium.

Well, it was kind of an accident, because plastic is not what I meant to invent. I had just sold photograph paper to Eastman Kodak for 1 million dollars.

Pictures are wasted unless the motive power which impelled you to action is strong and stirring.

Photographs also show the way that the camera sees. It's not just me or you or anybody else. The camera does something that is different from our own setting.

I forget nothing and then, one day, there will be revenge. Innocence isn't exactly everywhere. But I will say innocence also takes you far in photography.

What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm - the relationship between shapes and values.

Thinking should be done before and after, not during photographing.

What I did, anybody can do.

I have no fear of photography as long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell.

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

I'm a photographer, period. I love photography, the immediacy of it. I like the craft, the idea of saying 'I'm a photographer.'

John Loengard, the picture editor at Life, always used to tell me, ”If you want something to look interesting, don’t light all of it.

There is no question that photography has played a major role in the environmental movement.

The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.

Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images.

All we did was to turn back the time to a photography of precision which is superior to the human eye.

Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning.

I was extravagant in the matter of cameras - anything photographic - I had to have the best. But that was to further my work. In most things I have gone along with the plainest - or without.

The world makes up my pictures, not me.

The photographer projects himself into everything he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to know it and to feel it better.

It's just seeing - at least the photography I care about. You either see or you don't see. The rest is academic. Anyone can learn how to develop. It's how you organize what you see into a picture.

Photography is my only language.

To my father, art had no restrictions. He was a true 'American Primitive.' He greatly enjoyed sketching and photography, carrying a camera with him whenever he could.

Photography has been very, very generous to me, but at the same time has damaged me.

The digital image annihilates photography while solidifying, glorifying and immortalizing the photographic.

Everything is a subject. Every subject has a rhythm. To feel it is the raison detre. The photograph is a fixed moment of such a raison detre, which lives on in itself.