Quotes on Photography

Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium.  It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.
- Berenice Abbott

In my mind's eye, I visualize how a particular sight and feeling will appear on a print.  If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph.  It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice.
- Ansel Adams

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

I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term - meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching - there would be a vast improvement in total output.  The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.
- Ansel Adams

No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.  
- Ansel Adams

There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept. 
-Ansel Adams
 
Some photographers take reality...and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit.  Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation.
- Ansel Adams

It’s not hard being great occasionally.  It’s difficult to be good consistently.
- Richard Avedon

I always prefer to work in the studio.  It isolates people from their environment.  They become in a sense . . . symbolic of themselves.  I often feel that people come to me to be photographed, as they would go to a doctor or a fortune teller - to find out how they are.
- Richard Avedon

And if a day goes by without 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.  I know the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible.
- Richard Avedon

It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer.  You need less imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things.  But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary.
- David Bailey

A technical failure that shows some attempt at aesthetic expression is of infinitely more value than uninspired success.
- Cecil Beaton

Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.
- Cecil Beaton

The vital elements are often momentary, change-sent things ... a gleam of light on water, a trail of smoke from a passing train, a cat crossing the threshold.  Sometimes they are a matter of luck, sometimes of patience, waiting for an effect to be repeated that you have seen.  It is usually some incidental detail that heightens the effect of a picture, stressing a pattern, deepening the sense of atmosphere.
- Bill Brandt

In my portraits I try to avoid the fleeting expression and vivacity of a snapshot.
- Bill Brandt

In the absence of a subject with which you are passionately involved, and without the excitement that drives you to grasp it and exhaust it, you may take some beautiful pictures, but not a photographic oeuvre.
- Brassai

Chance is always there.  We all use it.  The difference is a poor photographer meets chance one out of a hundred times and a good photographer meets chance all the time.
- Brassai

The word 'art' is very slippery.  It really has no importance in relation to one's work.  I work for the pleasure, for the pleasure of the work, and everything else is a matter for the critics.
- Manuel Alvarez Bravo

A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be.  Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.
- Wynn Bullock

The urge to create, the urge to photograph, comes in part from the deep desire to live with more integrity, to live more in peace with the world, and possibly to help others to do the same. 
- Wynn Bullock

What you see is real - but only on the particular level to which you've developed your sense of seeing.  You can expand your reality by developing new ways of perceiving. 
- Wynn Bullock

Mysteries lie all around us, even in the most familiar things, waiting only to be perceived. 
- Wynn Bullock

I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied.
- Julia Margaret Cameron

If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough.
- Robert Capa, (before he got too close to the mine that killed him, while covering Indochina)

We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth can make them come back again.  We cannot develop and print a memory.
- Henri Cartier-Bresson

To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture a moment of fleeting reality.  It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.
- Henri Cartier-Bresson

To take a photograph means to recognize - simultaneously and within a fraction of a second - both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning.  It is putting one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis.
- Henri Cartier-Bresson

Photography appears to be an easy activity; in fact it is a varied and ambiguous process in which the only common denominator among its practitioners is in the instrument.
- Henri Cartier-Bresson

What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm - the relationship between shapes and values.
- Henri Cartier-Bresson

Nobody takes photographs, photographs take you. 
- Henri Cartier-Bresson

Which of my photographs is my favorite?  The one I'm going to take tomorrow.
- Imogen Cunningham

 If I knew how to take a good photograph, I'd do it every time.
- Robert Doisneau

What we do during our working hours determines what we have; what we do in our leisure hours determines what we are.
- George Eastman

Light makes photography.  Embrace light.  Admire it.  Love it.  But above all, know light.  Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography.
- George Eastman

Once the amateur's naive approach and humble willingness to learn fades away, the creative spirit of good photography dies with it.  Every professional should remain always in his heart an amateur.
- Alfred Eisenstaedt

It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.
- Alfred Eisenstaedt

It's about time we take photography seriously, and treat it as a hobby. 
- Elliott Erwitt

If you want to make good photographs, a camera has to be second nature to you.  Devoting too much attention to technical decisions can interfere with your creative processes.
- Robert Farber

No one can do inspired work without genuine interest in his subject and understanding of its characteristics.
- Andreas Feininger

The camera doesn't make a bit of difference.  All of them can record what you are seeing.  But, you have to SEE. 
- Ernst Haas

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

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see - without a camera. 
- Dorothea Lange

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.
- Dorothea Lange

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.
- Dorothea Lange

This benefit of seeing...can come only if you pause a while, extricate yourself from the maddening mob of quick impressions ceaselessly battering our lives, and look thoughtfully at a quiet image...the viewer must be willing to pause, to look again, to meditate.
- Dorothea Lange

I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects.  But I make them for myself first and foremost - that is important.  If they are art objects at the same time, that's fine with me.
- Jacques-Henri Lartigue

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.
 - Annie Leibovitz

If you are out there shooting, things will happen for you.  If you're not out there, you'll only hear about it.
- Jay Maisel

I paint what cannot be photographed, something from the imagination…  I photograph the things I don’t want to paint, things that are already in existence. 
- Man Ray

A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it.  It is, in a word, effective.
- Irving Penn

I believe all artists, if they are not lying to themselves, must believe that the best part of their work, or even their life, is in front of them.  To look only to the past and to say 'those were the best years, when I was young' is to say that in the future there is nothing.
- Jan Saudek

In music I still prefer the minor key, and in printing I like the light coming from the dark.  I like pictures that surmount the darkness, and many of my photographs are that way.  It is the way that I see photographically.  For practical reasons, I think it looks better that way in print, too.
- W. Eugene Smith

Passion is in all great searches and is necessary to all creative endeavors.
- W. Eugene Smith

Never have I found the limits of the photographic potential.  Every horizon, upon being reached, reveals another beckoning in the distance.  Always, I am on the threshold.
- W. Eugene Smith

Hardening of the categories causes art disease.
- W. Eugene Smith

It's no good saying, ‘hold it’ to a moment in real life.
 - Lord Snowdon

The use of the term ‘art medium’ is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium.  It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.
- Eduard Steichen

The faculty of imitation is inherent in human nature, and up to a certain point is one of the most important factors in our intellectual development, but when one has passed the period of primary education and begun to attack his life-work he must subdue the tendency to follow the easy path of redoing what others have done, and work directly from his own self-consciousness, if he is to attain any distinction.  It is indeed a fortunate man who, endowed with talent and courage, finds himself at work in a field where there are no precedents and who must simply follow the guidance of his own instincts.  Artwork produced in such circumstances, is generally fine and always interesting. 
- Eduard Steichen

Once you really commence to see things, then you really commence to feel things.
- Eduard Steichen

The ability to make a truly artistic photograph is not acquired off hand, but is the result of an artistic instinct coupled with years of labour. 
- Alfred Stieglitz 

It is not art in the professionalized sense about which I care, but that which is created sacredly, as a result of a deep inner experience, with all of oneself, and that becomes 'art' in time.
 - Alfred Stieglitz

The artist's world is limitless.  It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away.  It is always on the doorstep.
- Paul Strand

How charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durable and remain fixed upon the paper!  And why should it not be possible?  I asked myself.
- William Henry Fox Talbot (pioneer of the photographic process)

A photographer’s work is given shape and style by his personal vision.  It is not simply technique, but the way he looks at life and the world around him.
- Pete Turner

You can't depend on your eyes if your imagination is out of focus.
- Mark Twain

A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.
- Mark Twain

A great photograph is a distillation, a reduction of the chaos of our wider experience to a visually satisfying essence where what is excluded is as important as what is included.
- David Ward

The camera for an artist is just another tool.  It is no more mechanical than a violin if you analyze it.  Beyond the rudiments, it is up to the artist to create art, not the camera.
- Brett Weston

An excellent conception can be quite obscured by faulty technical execution or clarified by faultless technique. 
- Edward Weston

The photograph isolates and perpetuates a moment of time: an important and revealing moment, or an unimportant and meaningless one, depending upon the photographer's understanding of his subject and mastery of his process.
- Edward Weston

To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk.  Such rules and laws are deduced from the accomplished fact; they are the products of reflection.
- Edward Weston

Only with effort can the camera be forced to lie: basically it is an honest medium: so the photographer is much more likely to approach nature in a spirit of inquiry, of communion, instead of with the saucy swagger of self-dubbed ‘artists’
- Edward Weston

My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea.
- Edward Weston

Saturate yourself with your subject and the camera will all but take you by the hand and point the way.
- Margaret Bourke White

 There's no particular class of photograph that I think is any better than any other class.  I'm always and forever looking for the image that has spirit!  I don't give a damn how it got made.
- Minor White

Sometimes we work so fast that we don't really understand what's going on in front of the camera.  We just kind of sense that, 'Oh my God, it's significant!' and photograph impulsively while trying to get the exposure right.  Exposure occupies my mind while intuition frames the images.
- Minor White

Often while traveling with a camera we arrive just as the sun slips over the horizon of a moment, too late to expose film, only time enough to expose our hearts.
- Minor White

 I am always mentally photographing everything as practice.
- Minor White

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
- Oscar Wilde