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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"What is truth in photography? It can be told in a hundred different ways. Every thirtieth of a second when the shutter snaps, its capturing a different piece of information."
"You don't take a photograph, you make it."
"When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice."
"With the camera, it's all or nothing. You either get what you're after at once, or what you do has to be worthless. I don't think the essence of photography has the hand in it so much. The essence is done very quietly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine. I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking. After knowing what to take, you have to do the editing."
"There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer."
"An image is better than one thousand words"
"Incidentally, part of a photographer’s gift should be with people. You can do some wonderful work if you know how to make people understand what you’re doing and feel all right about it, and you can do terrible work if you put them on the defense, which they all are at the beginning. You’ve got to take them off their defensive attitude and make them participate."
"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."
"I wanted [my photography] to appear as though the camera was seeing by itself."
"I believe that the essence of photography is black and white. Color is but a deviance."
"How high your awareness level is determines how much meaning you get from your world. Photography can teach you to improve your awareness level."
"The meaning of quality in photography's best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system."
"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."
"Sometimes you can tell a large story with a tiny subject."
"It doesn't matter if you're photographing a porter in a market in Marrakech or you're photographing the king of Morroco. You have the same sympathetic approach to everybody. You be nice to everybody, basically."
"A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees."
"The eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts."
"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."
"The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied."
"A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into."
