Photographer Quotes

I wanted to be the photographer of happiness.

My true program is summed up in one word: life. I expect to photograph anything suggested by that word which appeals to me.

A mad, keen photographer needs to get out into the world and work and make mistakes.

The photographer who attempts to fit happily into the world by using the traditional perspective of the camera will end up falling into the hole of the "idea" he has dug for himself.

Contrast is what makes photography interesting.

The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.

Believe in yourself. Listen to the photographers you work with, and try to be professional at all time.

I'm a photographer and my pictures are used in advertising campaigns. But I don't do advertising. Do you hear me? I take pictures. I'm not an advertising agency. I'm not an advertising man.

Astonish me! (Instruction to photographers)

I believe that photography loves banal objects, and I love the life of objects.

When a photographer chooses a subject, he or she is making a claim on the interest and attention of future viewers, a prediction about what will be thought to have been important.

My photographs are not pure: they are a seething wealth of imperfection.

Ideas and thoughts collide and sort themselves out in these fruitful collisions.

I don't work with inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs. I just get to work.

Those who call themselves art photographers are pompous, arrogant egoists.

There exists an infinite universe between the boundaries of light and darkness; the photographer explores this chasm in a ship of the imagination, that is the camera.

I was brought up on art. My father thought I had a great hand at art and sent me to art school. But he did not want me to become a photographer.

The only nature I'm interested in is my own nature.

Photographers should follow their own judgment, and not the fads and dictates of others.

I don't go out looking for pictures. I go out, and if something catches my eye, that's reason enough to photograph it.

For a photographer, it's a necessity that you can shoot stuff magically. Accidents are necessary, but after I take the photograph, it's not over. I work on it more.

While we're working, we must be conscious of what we're doing.

I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible.

Photographs that transcend but do not deny their literal situation appeal to me.

A photographer kept shooting me every time I swung. I was very flattered until I found out he was from Field and Stream.

André Kertész has two qualities that are essential for a great photographer: an insatiable curiosity about the world, about people, and about life, and a precise sense of form.

The subject isn't always a help to the photographer, it's like handcuffs.

I got five kids, and my oldest is a documentary film maker and camera man, and still photographer.

It is the illusion of knowledge, not ignorance, that keeps one from growing.

I think of many of my photographs as being obviously symbolic but not symbolically obvious. There isn't any specific correlation between the symbols in this image and any content that I have in mind.

A photographer without imagination is not a good photographer.

I've thought of becoming a photographer! To save my talent as a writer.

[My work as a photographer is a] mission to document endangered species and landscapes in order to show a world worth saving.

It's not the photographer who makes the picture, but the person being photographed.

My way of photographing is my way of life. I photograph from my experience, my way of seeing things.

For me, art is such a wide concept - anything can be art.

I fell into this thing by accident. I was never supposed to be a photographer.

One impulse of photography, as immediate as its impulse to extend the visible, is to theatricalize its subjects. The photographer's command, Watch the birdie! is essentially a stage direction.

A photographer who wants to see, a photographer who wants to make fine images, must recognize the value in the familiar.

We know photographers make frames, but we deeply believe they can also create frameworks.

Before he has seen the whole, how unusually perceptive and imaginative the person must be to evolve the entire sequence by meditating on its single, pair or triplet of essential images.

A picture should be looked at - not talked about.

Believing in one’s own art becomes harder and harder when the public response grows fonder.

There is nothing so wrong as accepting a thing merely because men who have done things say it should be so.

There's nothing worse than a brilliant beginning.

You must have a visual sense if you want to be a photographer. It is a very subtle thing, this visual business.

You can't make a great musician or a great photographer if the magic isn't there.

To compose a subject well means no more than to see and present it in the strongest manner possible.

Many claim I am a photographer of tragedy. In the greater sense I am not, for though I often photograph where the tragic emotion is present, the result is almost invariably affirmative.

I've been a photographer for my whole life and I've done everything with photography that I felt I could do, and I always wanted to be a filmmaker.