Whether taking photos is a profession for you, a passion, or something else, this collection of the best photography quotes is meant to do justice to the art form.
To many, photography is about a profession. To others, it’s about a special occasion. There are others who think taking pictures is all about a phone with a camera. Then there are artists!
Photography is one, in fact, one of the most important professions ever. It has touched more people than any other profession ever to be practiced – almost every human being since the invention of the camera has been photographed at least once in their lifetimes.
It has captured the lives and emotions of tens of billions of people throughout its history. Enjoy our collection of the best photography quotes.
Quotes About Photography
- In photography, there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.
Alfred Stieglitz - The eye should learn to listen before it looks.
Robert Frank - The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.
Edward Weston - It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.
Paul Strand - Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.
Marc Riboud - A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.
Dorothea Lange - You don’t take a photograph, you make it.
Ansel Adams - Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Best Photo Quotations
There are no bad pictures; that’s just how your face looks sometimes.
Abraham Lincoln
Photography is a love affair with life.
Burk Uzzle
Photography, for me, is not looking; it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.
Don McCullin
All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.
Susan Sontag
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.
Robert Frank
Good Sayings
Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.
Ansel Adams
What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.
Karl Lagerfeld
Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.
Dorothea Lange
A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.
Eudora Welty
Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.
David Alan Harvey
A photograph is a moral decision taken in one-eighth of a second.
Salman Rushdie
In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a Leitmotiv.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Inspirational Photography Quotations
A landscape image cuts across all political and national boundaries; it transcends the constraints of language and culture.
Charlie Waite
In photography, there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.
August Sander
Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.
Alfred Stieglitz
A good photograph is knowing where to stand.
Ansel Adams
I began to realize that the camera sees the world differently than the human eye and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed.
Galen Rowell
Photography has no rules; it is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it is achieved.
Bill Brandt
Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Photographer Quotations
It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.
Eve Arnold
Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer – and often the supreme disappointment.
Ansel Adams
The more you photograph, the more you realize what can and what can’t be photographed. You just have to keep doing it.
Eliot Porter
Photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the photo as a judgment that the photograph is good.
Garry Winogrand
I’ll always be an amateur photographer.
Elliott Erwitt
Always seeing something, never seeing nothing, that’s being a photographer.
Walter De Mulder
No photographer is as good as the simplest camera.
Edward Steichen
I can get obsessed by anything if I look at it long enough. That’s the curse of being a photographer.
Irving Penn
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 extraordinary.
David Bailey
The Earth is Art; The Photographer is only a Witness
Yann Arthus-Bertrand
Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?
Pablo Picasso
Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper the photographer begins with the finished product.
Edward Steichen
The subject matter is so much more important than the photographer.
Gordon Parks
Kodak’s 10 Tips for Great Pictures
- Look at your subject in the eye.
- Use a plain background.
- Use flash outdoors.
- Move-in close.
- Move it from the middle.
- Lock the focus.
- Know your flash’s range.
- Watch the light.
- Take some vertical pictures.
- Be a picture director.
For a detailed explanation with photos, check out the full article at Kodak on taking great photos.
Short Photography Quotes
The best images are the ones that retain their strength and impact over the years, regardless of the number of times they are viewed.
Anne Geddes
Your photography is a record of your living for anyone who really sees.
Paul Strand
Photography is the art of frozen time… the ability to store emotions and feelings within a frame.
Unknown
You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.
Ansel Adams
Photography helps people to see.
Berenice Abbott
The camera cannot lie, but it can be an accessory to untruth.
Harold Evans
Taking Pictures Sayings
- Photographing a culture in the here and now often means photographing the intersection of the present with the past.
David DuChemin - A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.
Ansel Adams - The two most engaging powers of a photograph are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.
William Thackeray - One photo out of focus is a mistake, ten photos out of focus are an experimentation, one hundred photos out of focus are a style.
Unknown - Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.
Imogen Cunningham
Funny
- People say photographs don’t lie, mine do.
David LaChapelle - If an old man asks a young girl for a date…
That’s his business.
If the young girl accepts…
That’s her business.
If the old man and the girl decide to marry…
That’s their business.
However, if they want great wedding photographs…
THAT’S MY BUSINESS!!!
Unknown - When females take group photos. Gravity suddenly gets a lot stronger.
Unknown - The rarest thing in the world is a woman who is pleased with a photograph of herself.
Elizabeth Metcalf - If you saw a man drowning and you could either save him or photograph the event…what kind of film would you use?
Unknown - Everyone has a photographic memory. Some don’t have film.
Stephen Wright - A definition of a professional photographer: A pro never shows anybody the mistakes.
Unknown - How many photographers does it take to change a light bulb? 50. One to change the bulb, and forty-nine to say, I could have done that!
Unknown
Tip: Some of these best photography quotes make great photo captions themselves.
Black and White Photography Quotes
- When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!
Ted Grant - I’ve been forty years discovering that the queen of all colors is black.
Henri Mattise - Color is everything, black and white are more.
Dominic Rouse - Perhaps I am old-fashioned, but black and white films still hold an affectionate place in my heart; they have an incomparable mystique and mood.
Ginger Rogers - Black and white are the colors of photography. To me, they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected.
Robert Frank - There’s something strange and powerful about black-and-white imagery.
Stefan Kanfer - To see in color is a delight for the eye but to see in black and white is a delight for the soul.
Andri Cauldwell - I think it’s because it was an emotional story, and emotions come through much stronger in black and white. Colour is distracting in a way, it pleases the eye but it doesn’t necessarily reach the heart.
Kim Hunter - One very important difference between color and monochromatic photography is this: in black and white you suggest; in color you state. Much can be implied by suggestion, but the statement demands certainty… absolute certainty.
Paul Outerbridge - I work in color sometimes, but I guess the images I most connect to, historically speaking, are in black and white. I see more in black and white – I like the abstraction of it.
Mary Ellen Mark - Which is probably the reason why I work exclusively in black and white… to highlight that contrast.
Leonard Nimoy
By Mike O’Halloran
Mike is the editor of Greeting Card Poet.
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