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'm afraid we get a great deal of our exposure to art through magazines and through slides and I think this is dreadful, this is anti-art because art is direct experience with something in the world and photography is just a rumor, a kind of pornography of art."
"The ‘machine-gun’ approach to photography – by which many negatives are made with the hope that one will be good – is fatal to serious results."
"You don't make a photograph just with a camera"
"Your own photography is never enough. Every photographer who has lasted has depended on other peoples pictures too - photographs that may be public or private, serious or funny, but that carry with them a reminder of community."
"The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates."
"Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos."
"A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask."
"Today everything exists to end in a photograph."
"It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones."
"I love being photographed, or I should say I love the art of photography. It's about people taking photographs of you, stealing them, and then presuming or assuming or captioning. Words can never be taken back, photographs can never be taken back, nothing can ever be taken back."
"I forget nothing and then, one day, there will be revenge. Innocence isn't exactly everywhere. But I will say innocence also takes you far in photography."
"Photography is a generous medium."
"Photographs also show the way that the camera sees. It's not just me or you or anybody else. The camera does something that is different from our own setting."
"Photography is a strong tool, a propaganda device, and a weapon for the defense of the environment...and therefore for the fostering of a healthy human race and even very likely for its survival."
"Photography is an investigation of both the outer and the inner worlds. The first experiences with the camera involve looking at the world beyond the lens, trusting the instrument will 'capture' something 'seen.' The terms shoot and take are not accidental; they represent an attitude of conquest and appropriation. Only when the photographer grows into perception and creative impulse does the term make define a condition of empathy between the external and the internal events."
"The negative is the score, and the print the performance."
"To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces and record the qualities of nature and humanity which live or are latent in all things."
"A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels..."
"I hope that my work will encourage self expression in others and stimulate the search for beauty and creative excitement in the great world around us."
"It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument."
