Photographer Quotes

Usually, your personality doesn't come out on the cover of Vogue. If the photographer says, "Smile," you smile. You might not be in a good mood that day, but you're smiling anyway.

I liked the idea of being a photographer, just that you take this one picture of this one thing that'll never happen again - it's a bit weird when you think about it.

It’s a very weird thing being a photographer.

In the spirit of Vivian Maier, who worked unaided by any publication or commercial shooting, I set up the Emerging Photographer Fund

These are the two basic controls at the photographer's command--positi on and timing--all others are extensions, peripheral ones, compared to them

The adornment of the body is a human need. I don't see anything superficial about it unless your life becomes very materialistic.

The camera is cruel, so I try to be as good as I can to make things even.

The camera is a kind of license.

The more specific you are, the more general it'll be.

Was it the same light that enchanted the first photographers? It is the same, and it is still brand new - it is something that never wears out.

You don't study photography, you just do it.

All important pictures embody something that we do not yet understand.

What you need to be a good photographer is an overwhelming curiosity and a good digestion.

I've been an amateur photographer since my teens.

I've been a photographer all these years... I haven't been in my own darkroom for 10 years.

A picture is like a prayer.

The picture is good or not from the moment it was caught in the camera.

Photography is something you learn to love very quickly. I know that many, many things are going to ask me to have their pictures taken and I will take them all.

One shouldn’t be only two photographers but thousands.

Thus, during the winter of 2003 I ventured into a new arena as a professional photographer.

A photographer's art is more in his perceptions than his execution. In a painter, I think the perception is only the first step, and then you have a kind of hard road of execution.

Some of the angles that photographers get on court are not always flattering.

I try to begin working with no preconceived ideas.

A lot of what I am looking for is a moment of astonishment, he says. Those moments of pure consciousness when you involuntarily inhale and say 'Wow!'

I have to say, taking photographs is such an instantaneous act. The recognition and the acting on the recognition, depending on your equipment, is close to instantaneous.

We see the world through our experience.

I find the single most valuable tool in my darkroom is my trash can

Whatever it takes to get the image to reach that level is what that photographer needs to do.

Trained as a musician, [photographer Ansel] Adams understood the richness of variation that could be unfolded from a simple theme.

Luck is the attentive photographer's best teacher.

Have the utmost respect for your subjects. Love them.

The photographer can arrange his picture just as the painter does, only sometimes he must go about it in a different way.

The world was waiting to be full of discovery made(as a photographer) I could share the things I saw and learned.you would react to something all others might walk by.

Magnum photographers were meant to go out as a crusade ... to places like famine and war and ... I went out and went round the corner to the local supermarket because this to me is the front line.

I'm a documentary photographer. That's what I've always wanted to be; that's where my heart and soul is.

A very receptive state of mind... not unlike a sheet of film itself - seemingly inert, yet so sensitive that a fraction of a second's exposure conceives a life in it.

My father, an architectural photographer, was an incurable tinkerer, maker and mender.

I never thought of being a performer, never thought of being a singer, never thought of being a photographer. It's just the trajectory of my work. I go to the medium that serves the vision.

If as individuals we can improve the geography only slightly, if at all, perhaps the more appropriately scaled subject for reshaping is ourselves.

The job of the photographer, in my view, is not to catalogue indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope. This is not to say that he is unconcerned with the truth.

One must ease the public into it - that's an art in itself.

You know, you have to be an optimist, a pessimist, sarcastic and pleasant all at the same time to be a photographer.

Poetry is when you make new things familiar and familiar things new

You have to follow your instinct all the time. Otherwise you don't make it.

When the good pictures come, we hope they tell truths, but truths 'told slant,' just as Emily Dickinson commanded.

I wanted life to be episodic. I wanted to be a magazine photographer and I was willing to do what it took to become that.

There isn't an aspect of book creation I don't enjoy, and there has always been a book in my life to dream about or work on.

A photographer looks at everything, which is why he must look from beginning to end. Face the subject head-on, stay fixed, turn the entire body into an eye and face the world.

If I had seven lives, I'd be a photographer in every one.

A natural-born photographer, with hypo in my blood.