On Photography Quotes

Life is a journey, photography is thy shepherd.

Some people's photography is an art. Mine is not. If they happen to be exhibited in a gallery or a museum, that's fine. But that's not why I do them. I'm a gun for hire.

Photography is all about secrets... The secrets we all have and will never tell.

If you can smell the street by looking at the photo, it's a street photograph

There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph.

The photograph is completely abstracted from life, yet it looks like life. That is what has always excited me about photography.

When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.

Patience is the essence of clicking great Photographs!!

Collect moments rather than things. Moments get away.

A photograph is a biography of a moment.

Photography is like making cheese. It takes a hell of a lot of milk to make a small amount of cheese just like it takes a hell of a lot of photos to get a good one.

The clue to book jacket photography is to look friendly and approachable, but not too glamorous.

Now, to consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravity before going for a walk.

I was making photographs of the world long before I was a photographer.

Life as it unfolds in front of the camera is full of so much complexity, wonder and surprise that I find it unnecessary to create new realities. There is more pleasure, for me, in things as-they-are.

I fell in love with the process of taking pictures, with wandering around finding things. To me it feels like a kind of performance. The picture is a document of that performance.

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.

The function of the photographer is to help people understand the world around them.

If I am at a party, I want to be at the party. Too many photographers use the camera to avoid participating in things. They become professional observers.

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.

A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.

The world just does not fit conveniently into the format of a 35mm camera.

Above all, I know that life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference.

Photography - the new, rapid, concrete reflector of the world - should surely undertake to show the world from all vantage points, and to develop people's capacity to see from all sides. (1928)

For me, the strength of photography lies in its ability to evoke humanity. If war is an attempt to negate humanity, then photography can be perceived as the opposite of war.

The photographic image... is a message without a code.

Try to go out empty and let your images fill you up.

There are no bad pictures; that's just how your face looks sometimes.

I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don't like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.

The enemy of photography is the convention, the fixed rules of 'how to do'. The salvation of photography comes from the experiment.

She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes.

What I find interesting is working in a society with certain taboos and fashion photography is about that kind of society. To have taboos, then to get around them that is interesting.

I always say that photography's closest cousin is poetry because of the way it sparks your imagination and leaves gaps for the viewer to fill in.

I am not interested in rules or conventions. Photography is not a sport.

[Photojournalism] really is the only branch of photography that's a credit to our profession. We see, we understand; we see more, we understand more.

Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.

I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.

In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present.

For me the true business of photography is to capture a bit of reality (whatever that is) on film...if, later, the reality means something to someone else, so much the better.

I'm not an artist. An artist makes an object. Me, it's not an object, I work in history, I'm a storyteller.

Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.

Things happen in front of you. That's perhaps the most wonderful and mysterious aspect of photography.

Perhaps most intriguing of all is that it is possible to photograph what is impossible for the human eye to see - cumulative time.

I have a deep respect and love for these tiny humans, and I hope to convey in my images a measure of the beauty that exists in all children.

No matter how slow the film, Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer It has chosen.

Photography cannot change the world, but it can show the world, especially when it changes.

A woman artist could be one of those intuitive geniuses [who] have kept their childlike spirit and have added to it breadth of vision and experience.

Anyone interested in design must be interested in other fields of expression - theater, ballet, photography, literature, music.

My creative process begins when I get out with the camera and interact with the world. A camera is truly a license to explore. There are no uninteresting things. There are just uninterested people.

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.