On Photography Quotes

To suggest is to create; to describe is to destroy.

The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.

Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.

A picture is the expression of an impression. If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it?

Photography just gets us out of the house.

Significance is inherent in the human body.

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

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.

The context in which a photograph is seen affects the meaning the viewer draws from it.

Photography is no longer a love affair with the beauty of reality.

In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.

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.

It was the era of photography. This may have influenced us, and played a part in our reaction against anything resembling a snapshot of life. (On the year 1905)

Photography can strip from the world that spiritual dust and grime with which our eyes have covered it.

It is the end result that counts.

[Photography is] very related to poetry. It's suggestive and fragmentary and unsatisfying in a lot of ways. It's as much about what you leave out as what you put in.

Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience.

Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes a precise moment in time.

Always carry a camera, it's tough to shoot a picture without one.

Every photograph is a battle of form versus content.

All the technique in the world doesn't compensate for the inability to notice.

If you take photos, don't speak, don't write, don't analyze yourself, and don't answer any questions.

I think photojournalism is documentary photography with a purpose.

Think about the photo before and after, never during. The secret is to take your time. You mustn't go too fast. The subject must forget about you. Then, however, you must be very quick.

Of course it's all luck.

When you photograph a face . . .you photograph the soul behind it.

Photography to the amateur is recreation, to the professional it is work, and hard work too, no matter how pleasurable it my be.

I think all art is about control, the encounter between control and uncontrollable.

Photography was the first available demonstration that light could indeed exert an action sufficient to cause changes in material bodies.

I get totally out of myself. It's the closest I come to not existing, I think, which is the best - which is to me attractive.

Photography was a license to go wherever I wanted and to do what I wanted to do.

Photography doesn't teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.

The more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.

Within every man and woman a secret is hidden, and as a photographer it is my task to reveal it if I can.

God gave me photography so that I could pray with my eyes.

A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there-even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.

The very secret of life for me, I believed, was to maintain in the midst of rushing events an inner tranquility.

If you are not passionately devoted to an idea, you can make very pleasant pictures but they won't make you cry.

I never have taken a picture I've intended. They're always better or worse.

My cloud photographs are equivalents of my most profound life experiences, my basic philosophy of life. All art is an equivalent of the artist’s most profound life experiences.

There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.

I went into photography because it seemed like the perfect vehicle for commenting on the madness of today's existence.

For me, the act of photography is all about discovery and finding new things.

[Dada is] perfectly kindhearted malice, alongside exact photography the only legitimate pictorial form of communication and balance in shared experience.

Photography has no rules, it is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it is achieved.

I tell a little bit of my life to them, and they tell a little of theirs to me. The picture itself is just the tip of the iceberg.

While photography is the easiest medium in which to be competent, it is the hardest in which to develop an idiosyncratic personal vision.

I have gradually confused photography with life.

In black and white you suggest, in color you state.

Photography has always been about documentary, the depiction of the instant, a moment, sometimes a place. Each project is somehow an experimentation of a specific context or a character.