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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"[Photography] is always like a state of grace, like the appearance of something that I hadn't foreseen, that surprises me and stops me. If I only did what I had in mind, there would be no emotion. It would be like keeping one's eyes shut rather than open, like theorizing rather than seeing."
"Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images."
"Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution."
"We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium."
"Good photography is unpretentious."
"Little wonder that we. . .find the old pictures of openness - pictures usually without any blur, and made by what seems a ritual of patience - wonderful. They restore to us knowledge of a place we seek but lose in the rush of our search. Though to enjoy even the pictures, much less the space itself, requires that we be still longer than is our custom."
"Photography is an empathy towards the world."
"It's easy to photograph light reflecting from a surface, the truly hard part is capturing the light in the air."
"Why should there be only one sort of photography? I want to create images with elements of my choosing, narrative or evocative... I give myself a literary frame, I tell a story."
"Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing."
"It might be more useful, if not necessarily more true, to think of photography as a narrow, deep area between the novel and film."
"Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop."
"There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept."
"Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art."
"I work rather blindly. I have a theory that seems to work with me that some of the best things you ever do sort of come through you. You don't know where you get the impetus and response to what's before your eyes."
"Leaving aside the mysteries and the inequities of human talent, brains, taste, and reputations, the matter of art in photography may come down to this: it is the capture and projection of the delights of seeing; it is the defining of observation full and felt."
"There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera."
"I'm not a social person. Not that I'm not at ease. I'm pretty good, but it bores me. Not the people, but the whole thing. What for? It's not very productive. I only want to do what I have to do: fashion, photography, books. And that's all."
"It fascinates me that there is a variety of feeling about what I do. I'm not a premeditative photographer. I see a picture and I make it. If I had a chance, I'd be out shooting all the time. You don't have to go looking for pictures. The material is generous. You go out and the pictures are staring at you."
"A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity."
