Photography quotes
3.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside photography — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I want to allow others to reveal and celebrate aspects of themselves that are usually hidden. My camera is a witness. It holds a light up for my subjects to help them feel their own essence, and gives them the courage to collaborate in the recording of these revelations."
"The people I work with, the people I photograph, become a kind of family for me."
"I never chased after any particular school, never really had mentors; I really just did the work that was true to me."
"I have the same themes over and over again. How I'm saying it keeps changing or growing."
"I try to neutralize my figures; I want them to be mythic and timeless. I want them to exist beyond time. I've used the skull caps or cowls to banish hair, which is distracting. I want to isolate the face and concentrate on what is really going on deep within my subjects."
"I seek what lies beneath surface beauty. What interests me are intimate human complexities - the darkness as well as the light. I cannot will this kind of transcendent communication into existence. I have to be open and truly present, and if I am lucky, grace descends. My best photographs are an honest collaboration, and when the viewer also connects, I feel the circle is complete."
"Find the one thing you’re good at and FOCUS on it."
"I love feeling that I am opening new worlds for people who don't have time to investigate these things themselves."
"I tell you (dogmatically, if you like to call it so, knowing it well) a square inch of man's engraving is worth all the photographs that were ever dipped in acid... Believe me, photography can do against line engraving just what Madame Tussaud's wax-work can do against sculpture. That and no more. (1865)"
"[Cameras] tend to turn people into things and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise and, [in the age of photography] the world itself becomes a sort of museum of objects that have been encountered before in some other museum and to say that the camera cannot lie is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name."
"Nobody can commit photography alone."
"My biggest challenge was moving from photography to film without losing my way of working - which is very intimate and learning to collaborate with more people, since photography for me is a very solitary process."
"I mean, there are peripheral things I do, I do photography, I write plays, I have books published, but that's neither here not there."
