On Photography Quotes

It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.

Documentary: That’s a sophisticated and misleading word. And not really clear… The term should be documentary style… You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless.

An image is better than one thousand words

Somehow Photoshop and the ease with which one can produce an image has degraded the quality of photography in general.

Since the photographic medium has been digitized, a fixed definition of the term photography has become impossible.

I wanted [my photography] to appear as though the camera was seeing by itself.

I think that, in a sense, there's something about photography in general that we could associate with memory, or the past, or childhood.

There is no other art with as great a democratic capacity as photography.

If a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it's as though I've neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up.

My passion is to open people's eyes to the sea using the power of photography as a universal language to convince the unconvinced among us that the oceans are fragile and finite.

There is a job to be doneto record the truth. I want to wake people up!

The discussion about whether photography is or isn't art is dated and of no interest. Your work makes you an artist, not your title.

If you love something, the work will be just fine.

At first glance a photograph can inform us. At second glance it can reach us.

Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.

The art is the challenge which you must meet every day: the technique you should learn to control with time. The science and the art of photography are really one, and not opposed to each other.

The photographer is a manipulator of light; photography is a manipulation of light.

I believe that the essence of photography is black and white. Color is but a deviance.

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.

I guess I've shot about 40,000 negatives and of these I have about 800 pictures I like.

Photography was the only thing that mattered in my life and I gave it everything.

I never liked photography. Not for the sake of photography. I like the object. I like the photographs when you hold them in your hand.

It is every photographer's responsibility to discover new images and a new personal way of looking at things. If he can do this his pictures will command attention and have surprise quality.

If you see something you have seen before, don't click the shutter.

For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.

Technically, I have not changed very much. Ask my assistants. They'll tell you, I am the easiest photographer to work with. I don't have heavy equipment. I work out of one bag.

The meaning of quality in photography's best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system.

How high your awareness level is determines how much meaning you get from your world. Photography can teach you to improve your awareness level.

I don't photograph any two people who are remotely the same.

Sometimes it’s not how much light you use to get an effect, it’s how little you use and still make it work. There are a lot of rules to be broken in photography, and you’ve got to have courage.

Photography, if there is photography, is already snapped, already shot, in the very interior of things and for all points of space.

To be ready is one thing, to be able to wait is another; but to seize the right moment is everything.

Look at lots of exhibitions and books, and don't get hung up on cameras and technical things. Photography is about images.

People are under the illusion that it's easy...Technically, it is complex. You have a million options with equipment to distract you. I tell my students to simplify their equipment.

Photography itself is most frequently nothing but the reproduction of the image that a group produces of its own integration.

There is a camera is between a man and a woman.

Nothing happens when you sit at home. I always make it a point to carry a camera with me at all times...I just shoot at what interests me at that moment.

The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.

Photography isolates the world via an aperture and gives the photographer the means to see differently, to achieve a spontaneous vision that is direct and uncompromising.

Photography is an act of love.

If anyone gets in my way when I'm making a picture, I become irrational. I'm never sure what I am going to do, or sometimes even aware of what I do-only that I want that picture.

As an avid photographer, I also took advantage of the latest technology in photography - digital photography - to post photos on my website on a daily basis.

We don't take pictures with cameras, we take them with our hearts and minds.

What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.

Only in black and white can I see the design and textures. I don't consider color photography art. Black and white is an interpretation. Color is a duplication.

I find it some of the hardest photography and the most challenging photography I've ever done. It's a real challenge to work with the natural features and the natural light.

That celebrated marriage of science and art, photography, seemed at the time to join together how we look at the world, art, with how we were coming to know it, science.

Sometimes you can tell a large story with a tiny subject.

The eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.

In photography we possess an extraordinary instrument for reproduction. But photography is much more than that. Today it is [a method for bringing optically] some thing entirely new into the world.