.

.

Photography can be a form of magic

• I can preserve a child’s smile. Make any woman feel beautiful.  Bring a grown man to tears 50 years from now.  And freeze time.  What’s your superpower?
• Magic,  Art,  Beauty

.

Photography can be understood in any language

• Photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world. Bruno Barbey
• Language,  Understanding

.

Photography can evoke strong feeling

• Even though fixed in time, a photograph evokes as much feeling as that which comes from music or dance. Whatever the mode – from the snapshot to the decisive moment to multi-media montage – the intent and purpose of photography is to render in visual terms feelings and experiences that often elude the ability of words to describe. In any case, the eyes have it, and the imagination will always soar farther than was expected. Ralph Gibson
• I want the viewers to be moved into the lives of the people that they are looking at, the visual experience is incredibly emotional. Paul Fusco
• Emotion

.

Photography reveals and aids discovery

• Both the grand and the intimate aspects of nature can be revealed in the expressive photograph. Both can stir enduring affirmations and discoveries, and can surely help the spectator in his search for identification with the vast world of natural beauty and the wonder surrounding him. Ansel Adams
• It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us. Henri Cartier- Bresson
• When I photograph, what I’m really doing is seeking answers to things. Wynn Bullock
• Taking pictures is like fishing or writing. It’s getting out of the unknown that which resists and refuses to come to light. Jean Gaumy
• For me, photography has become a way of attempting to make sense of the strange world that I see around me. I don’t ever expect to achieve that understanding, but the fact that I am trying comforts me. Mikhael Subotzky
• In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated. August Sander
• Discovery

.

Photography explains man to man

• The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each to himself. And that is the most complicated thing on earth. Edward Steichen
• Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man.  Edward Steichen

.

Photography can be a force for good in the world

• Photography is a strong tool, a propaganda device, and a weapon for the defence of the environment…and therefore for the fostering of a healthy human race and even very likely for its survival. Eliot Porter
• There is no question that photography has played a major role in the environmental movement. Galen Rowell
• I don’t want anyone to appreciate the light or the palette of tones. I want my pictures to inform, to provoke discussion – and to raise money. Sebastiao Salgado

.

.

Photography helps us to see the world around us

• Photography helps people to see. James Everet
• I think a photography class should be a requirement in all educational programs because it makes you see the world rather than just look at it.
• The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera. Dorothea Lange
• While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see. Dorothea Lange
• It’s been said that the role of the artist is to teach us to see and that’s true. However, the role of other artists is to teach me how they see. To learn how I see is something that cannot be taught but must be learned. Brooks Jensen
• There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are. Ernst Haas
• The camera doesn’t make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But, you have to see. Ernst Haas
• Looking and seeing are two different things. What matters is the relationship with the subject. Christophe Agou
• When people ask me what equipment I use – I tell them my eyes.
• I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them. Diane Arbus
• 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
• My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, or the camera’s eye may entirely change my idea. Edward Weston
• The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to tranform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking – and looking. Brooks Atkinson
• When I look through the lens, I see life. Ali Edwards
• Perception

.

Photography can make us more aware

• Photography is a small voice, at best, but sometimes one photograph, or a group of them, can lure our sense of awareness. Eugene Smith
• All the technique in the world doesn’t compensate for the inability to notice. Elliott Erwitt
• Awareness,  Attention

.

Photography adds interest and fascination and excitement to life

• No place is boring, if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film. Robert Adams
• The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street. Robert Doisneau
• The artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep. Paul Strand
• What it all boils down to for me is having the enthusiasm to do something for enjoyment and being stimulated by what’s around you. That’s what photography does for me. Graeme Le Saux
• Excitement

.

Photography can be a great pleasure and joy

• To photograph is to hold one’s breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy. Henri Cartier-Bresson
• Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure. Tony Benn
• Pleasure,  Joy

.

Photography is a reason to wander, explore and observe

• My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport. Steve McCurry
• I fell in love with taking pictures, with wandering around finding things. To me it feels like a kind of performance. The picture is a document of that performance. Alec Soth
• The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don’t belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation. Susan Meiselas
• Wonder,  Exploration,  Observation

.

.

Photography is about finding something interesting in the ordinary

• Photography is a means by which we learn to see the ordinary. David Bailey
• To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them. Elliott Erwitt
• Quit trying to find beautiful objects to photograph. Find the ordinary objects so you can transform it by photographing it. Morley Baer
• Anyone can shoot chaos. But the most perceptive photographers can make compelling pictures out of uninteresting moments. Alex Tehrani

.

Photography is far more than just a pretty picture

• Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality. It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term – selectivity. Berenice Abbott

.

Photography can be a unique and expressive art form

• Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art. Ansel Adams
• Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution. Ansel Adams
• Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself. Berenice Abbott
• Art

.

Photography can be both art and record

• Photography has the capacity to provide images of man and his environment that are both works of art and moments in history. Cornell Capa
• I don’t care so much anymore about ‘good photography’; I am gathering evidence for history. Gilles Peress
• A photograph has picked up a fact of life, and that fact will live forever. Raghu Rai
• Photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future. Sally Mann

.

.

Photography is not just about looking, but feeling too

• 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
• Above all, life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference. Robert Frank
• Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. Oscar Wilde
• Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts. Walker Evans
• Emotion or feeling is really the only thing about pictures I find interesting. Beyond that is is just a trick. Christopher Anderson
• Emotions

.

Photography is about revealing secrets

• A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know. Diane Arbus
• Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell. Kim Edwards

.

Photography goes beyond description to bring insight and emotion

• Photographers tend not to photograph what they can’t see, which is the very reason one should try to attempt it. Otherwise we’re going to go on forever just photographing more faces and more rooms and more places. Photography has to transcend description. It has to go beyond description to bring insight into the subject, or reveal the subject, not as it looks, but how does it feel? Duane Michals
• Insight,  Emotions

.

Photography is a way of relating with the world

• Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever. . . it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything. Aaron Sussman

.

Photography is about light

• To love beauty is to see light. Victor Hugo
• In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary. Aaron Rose
• John Loengard, the picture editor at Life, always used to tell me, “If you want something to look interesting, don’t light all of it. Joe McNally
• You’ve gotta taste the light, like my friend and fellow shooter Chip Maury says. And when you see light like this, trust me, it’s like a strawberry sundae with sprinkles. Joe McNally
• Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography. George Eastman
• Light glorifies everything. It transforms and ennobles the most commonplace and ordinary subjects. The object is nothing, light is everything. Leonard Missone
• I am forever chasing light. Light turns the ordinary into the magical. Trent Parke
• The only ‘bad light’ is the absence of light altogether.
• What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time. John Berger
• Light

.

Photography is about position and timing

• These are the two basic controls at the photographer’s command–position and timing–all others are extensions, peripheral ones, compared to them. David Hurn
• A good photograph is knowing where to stand. Ansel Adams

.

Photography is about practice and talent, not expensive equipment

• Don’t think expensive equipment will make up for lack of talent or practice. Jackson Brown Jr.
• Maybe because it’s entirely an artist’s eye, patience and skill that makes an image and not his tools. Ken Rockwell
• If I have any ‘message’ worth giving to a beginner it is that there are no short cuts in photography. Edward Weston
• Skill in photography is acquired by practice and not by purchase. Percy W. Harris
• Practice,  Talent

.

Photography is about capturing fleeting moments that will never return

• Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. Henri Cartier-Bresson
• Perishability in a photograph is important in a picture. If a photograph looks perishable we say, “Gee, I’m glad I have that moment.”  John Loengard
• What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce. Karl Lagerfeld
• A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you. Brigitte Bardot
• I know the best moments can never be captured on film, even as I spend nearly half my life trying to do just that. Rosie O’Donnell
• I want pictures like these. The kind that can capture a moment, make it real, make it last. I need pictures that do more than reflect. I need pictures that are truth. Lisa Magnum
• A good snapshot stops a moment from running away. Eudora Welty
• If you see something that moves you, and then snap it, you keep a moment. Linda McCartney
• In the world of photography, you get to share a captured moment with other people. James Wilson
• Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past. Berenice Abbott
• Impermanence,  Life is fleeting

.

Photography is the art of frozen time

• Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still. Dorothea Lange
• A photograph is the pause button on life. Ty Holland
• Photography is the art of frozen time… the ability to store emotion and feelings within a frame. Meshack Otieno
• Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption. Andre Bazin
• As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs. Sam Abell
• 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 Sonrag
• Time

.

Photography is about captured memories

• Kodak sells film, but they don’t advertise film; they advertise memories. Theodore Levitt
• A photograph is memory in the raw. Carrie Latet
• A photograph is like the recipe – a memory the finished dish. Carrie Latet
• Memory

.

Photography is a form of hunting

• The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box. Henri Cartier-Bresson
• Actually, I’m not all that interested in the subject of photography. Once the picture is in the box, I’m not all that interested in what happens next.  Hunters, after all, aren’t cooks.  Henri Cartier- Bresson
• There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit. William S. Burroughs
• I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it. Lorrie Moore

.

Photography is about capturing truth – or is it?

• Photography is truth. Jean-Luc Godard
• I want pictures like these. The kind that can capture a moment, make it real, make it last. I need pictures that do more than reflect. I need pictures that are truth. Lisa Magnum
• A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth. Richard Avedon
• The camera cannot lie, but it can be an accessory to untruth. Harold Evans
• The photograph itself doesn’t interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.  Henri Cartier-Bresson
• Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. Eddie Adams
• Ultimately photography is about who you are. It’s the truth in relation to yourself. And seeking truth becomes a habit. Leonard Freed
• A tear contains an ocean. A photographer is aware of the tiny moments in a person’s life that reveal greater truths.
• Truth

.

Photography can become more real than reality

• Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality. Alfred Stieglitz
• I’ve finally figured out what’s wrong with photography. It’s a one-eyed man looking through a little ‘ole. Now, how much reality can there be in that? David Hockney
• I have always been very interested in photography. I have looked at far more photographs than I have paintings. Because their reality is stronger than reality itself. Francis Bacon
• Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be. Duane Michals
• There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment. This kind of photography is realism. But realism is not enough – there has to be vision, and the two together can make a good photograph. Robert Frank
• The photograph is completely abstracted from life, yet it looks like life. That is what has always excited me about photography. Richard Kalvar
• Taking an image, freezing a moment, reveals how rich reality truly is.
• Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts. Garry Winogrand
• With photography, I like to create fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society’s natural prejudice and giving this a twist. Martin Parr
• Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real. Ansel Adams
• Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world. Arnold Newman
• Reality

.

Photography is about savouring life

• Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second. Marc Riboud
• Savouring

.

Your photography says you lived

• Your birth certificate says you were born. Your death certificate says you died. Your photographs say you lived.
• Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees. Paul Strand
• Being fully alive

.

Your photography is an expression of what you feel about life

• A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense, and is, thereby, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety. Ansel Adams

.

.

Great photography has very little to do with the quality of your camera

• A photographer went to a socialite party in New York. As he entered the front door, the host said, ‘I love your pictures – they’re wonderful; you must have a fantastic camera.’ He said nothing until dinner was finished, then: ‘That was a wonderful dinner; you must have a terrific stove. Sam Haskins
• If you own an oven it does not make you a top chef. Likewise, if you own a camera, it does not make you a professional photographer. Giles Christopher
• No matter how advanced your camera you still need to be responsible for getting it to the right place at the right time and pointing it in the right direction to get the photo you want. Ken Rockwell
• The camera doesn’t make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But, you have to see. Ernst Haas

.

Strive for simplicity in your photos

• What’s really important is to simplify. The work of most photographers would be improved immensely if they could do one thing: get rid of the extraneous. If you strive for simplicity, you are more likely to reach the viewer. William Albert Allard
• Simplicity

.

Step back from what you’re photographing

• Best wide-angle lens? Two steps backward. Look for the ‘ah-ha’.  Ernst Haas

.

Embrace your photographic journey as an adventure

• I wish more people felt that photography was an adventure the same as life itself and felt that their individual feelings were worth expressing. To me, that makes photography more exciting. Harry Callahan
• Experience is the best teacher of all. And for that, there are no guarantees that one will become an artist. Only the journey matters. I wish more people felt that photography was an adventure the same as life itself and felt that their individual feelings were worth expressing. To me, that makes photography more exciting. Harry Callahan
• Adventure

.

Use your heart and mind as the lens

• Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera. Yousuf Karsh
• It’s not how a photographer looks at the world that is important. It’s their intimate relationship with it. Antoine D’Agata

.

Let your camera be your sketch book

• For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity. Henri Cartier- Bresson

.

Get close to your subject

• If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough. Robert Capa

.

Let your photos tell a story

• Pictures could not be accessories to the story — evidence — they had to contain the story within the frame; the best picture contained a whole war within one frame. Tatjana Soli
• If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera. Lewis Hine
• Sometimes you can tell a large story with a tiny subject. Eliot Porter
• I have the great privilege of being both witness and storyteller. Intimacy, trust and intuition guide my work. Jim Goldberg
• Photography must be integrated with the story. James Wong Howe
• Stories

.

Lose yourself in your photography

• When I have sex with someone I forget who I am. For a minute I even forget I’m human. It’s the same thing when I’m behind a camera. I forget I exist. Robert Mapplethorpe
• Immerse yourself in what you do

.

Let your photos speak for themselves

• I’m not a particularly verbose person. I think that’s why I like taking pictures… they speak for themselves.  Jeb Dickerson
• Good photos are like good jokes. If you have to explain it, it just isn’t that good.
• A photograph is just a picture if it doesn’t say anything.

.

Don’t let your camera get in the way of taking great photos

• The camera’s only job is to get out of the way of making photographs. Ken Rockwell
• I don’t get wrapped up in technique and the like. Fay Godwin
• I only use a camera like I use a toothbrush. It does the job. Don McCullin

.

Don’t discount the power of luck in taking a great photograph

• Ultimately it’s all luck! Henri Cartier-Bresson
• Sometimes I do get to places just when God’s ready to have somebody click the shutter. Ansel Adams

.

Keep a beginner’s mind

• Once the amateur’s naive approach and humble willingness to learn fades away, the creative spirit of good photography dies with it. Every professional should remain always in his heart an amateur. Alfred Eisenstaedt
• Beginner’s mind

.

Take many photos to get a great one

• Photography is like making cheese. It takes a hell of a lot of milk to make a small amount of cheese just like it takes a hell of a lot of photos to get a good one. Robert Gillis
• Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop. Ansel Adams
• A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity. George Bernard Shaw
• I guess I’ve shot about 40,000 negatives and of these I have about 800 pictures I like. Harry Callahan

.

Keep practicing and probing deeper and your photos will only get better

• Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst. Henri Cartier-Bresson
• You’ve got to push yourself harder. You’ve got to start looking for pictures nobody else could take. You’ve got to take the tools you have and probe deeper. William Albert Allard
• Which of my photographs is my favourite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow. Imogen Cunningham

.

Carry a camera with you always and see photos everywhere

• Nothing happens when you sit at home. I always make it a point to carry a camera with me at all times…I just shoot at what interests me at that moment. Elliott Erwitt
• Everywhere I look and most of the time I look, I see photographs. Bert Hardy

.

Don’t be in a rush to pack up your camera

• Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location. Joe McNally

.

Find interesting subject matter to photograph

• If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff. Jim Richardson
• For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. Diane Arbus

.

Capture beauty through your photography, realising that beauty can be found in imperfect and ordinary things

• Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it. Confucius
• Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph. Matt Hardy
• To love beauty is to see light. Victor Hugo
• So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful. Susan Sonrag
• A Ming vase can be well-designed and well-made and is beautiful for that reason alone. I don’t think this can be true for photography.  Unless there is something a little incomplete and a little strange, it will simply look like a copy of something pretty.  We won’t take an interest in it.  John Loengard
• A picture is the expression of an impression. If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it? Ernst Haas
• Quit trying to find beautiful objects to photograph. Find the ordinary objects so you can transform it by photographing it. Morley Baer
• Photography is the beauty of life, captured. Tara Chisholm
• Photography is the recording of strangeness and beauty with beguiling precision. Sebastian Smee
• Beauty,  Life is in the little things

.

Drink in the scene, even if you’re unable to photograph it

• Often while traveling with a camera we arrive just as the sun slips over the horizon of a moment, too late to expose film, only time enough to expose our hearts. Minor White
• There will be times when you will be in the field without a camera. And, you will see the most glorious sunset or the most beautiful scene that you have ever witnessed.  Don’t be bitter because you can’t record it.  Sit down, drink it in, and enjoy it for what it is!  DeGriff

.

Let your photography reveal the depth, wonder and beauty of nature

• Both the grand and the intimate aspects of nature can be revealed in the expressive photograph. Both can stir enduring affirmations and discoveries, and can surely help the spectator in his search for identification with the vast world of natural beauty and the wonder surrounding him. Ansel Adams
• I didn’t want to tell the tree or weed what it was. I wanted it to tell me something and through me express its meaning in nature.  Wynn Bullock
• The earth is art, The photographer is only a witness. Yann Arthus-Bertrand
• It is my intention to present – through the medium of photography – intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators. Ansel Adams
• Nature

.

Let your photography be inspired by your life

• 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
• Pictures you have taken have an influence on those that you are going to make. That’s life! John Sexton
• Everything shifts as you move, and different things come into focus at different points of your life, and you try to articulate that. Chris Steele–Perkins
• The key is to integrate our art into our life, not the other way around. Brooks Jensen

.

Use the camera as though tomorrow you’ll be stricken blind

• One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it. Dorothea Lange

.

Don’t get too caught up in the rules of photography

• There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs. Ansel Adams
• To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk. Edward Weston
• I am not interested in rules or conventions. Photography is not a sport. Bill Brandt
• There are no rules and regulations for perfect composition. If there were we would be able to put all the information into a computer and would come out with a masterpiece. We know that’s impossible. You have to compose by the seat of your pants. Arnold Newman

.

Be inspired by photos of nature, love and joy

• Arrange photographs of nature scenes, animals and expressions of joy and love in your environment and let their energy radiate into your heart and provide you with their higher frequency. Wayne Dyer
• Nature,  Love,  Joy

.

Connect with the people you photograph, if only in spirit

• I love the people I photograph. I mean, they’re my friends. I’ve never met most of them or I don’t know them at all, yet through my images I live with them. Bruce Gilden
• If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument. Eve Arnold

.

Realise the best photos are often to be found at the edges of a situation

• I think the best pictures are often on the edges of any situation, I don’t find photographing the situation nearly as interesting as photographing the edges. William Albert Allard
• I don’t just look at the thing itself or at the reality itself; I look around the edges for those little askew moments – kind of like what makes up our lives-those slightly awkward, lovely moments. Keith Carter

.

Celebrate mystery through your photos

• There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described. I photograph to see what something will look like photographed. Garry Winogrand
• I find it particularly exciting when a picture evokes anything near that word, ‘mystery’. Jeff Mermelstein
• The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. Oscar Wilde
• Mystery

.

Take photos first and foremost for yourself

• I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost – that is important. Jacques-Henri Lartigue

.

Be more interested in inspiration than technique

• Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask ‘how’, while others of a more curious nature will ask ‘why’. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information. Man Ray
• Look at lots of exhibitions and books, and don’t get hung up on cameras and technical things. Photography is about images. Fay Godwin
• Inspiration

.

Be more interested in what is inside you than developing a particular style

• I don’t believe a person has a style. What people have is a way of photographing what is inside them. What is there comes out. Sebastiao Salgado

.

Make your photography into a form of meditation

• Be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence. Minor White
• Photography is my meditation. Czar Anthony Lopez
• My photography is a reflection, which comes to life in action and leads to meditation. Spontaneity – the suspended moment – intervenes during action, in the viewfinder. Abbas
• No matter how slow the film, Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer It has chosen. Minor White
• Meditation

.

.

A great photo is worth a thousand words – or is it?

• The camera would miss it all. A magnificent picture is never worth a thousand perfect words. Ansel Adams can be a great artist, but he can never be Shakespeare. His tools are too literal. John Dunning
• I’m not a particularly verbose person. I think that’s why I like taking pictures… they speak for themselves.  Jeb Dickerson
• If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera. Lewis Hine
• When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.  Ansel Adams

.

Great photos are those that compel deep looking, and sear themselves into people’s minds

• 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
• You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life. Joan Miró
• A photograph is usually looked at – seldom looked into. Ansel Adams
• 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

.

Great photos are made, not taken

• You don’t take a photograph, you make it. Ansel Adams
• There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph. Robert Heinecken
• I am not an artist. I am an image maker. Thomas Hoepker

.

.

Dealing well with people can be an important part of photography

• I have to be as much diplomat as a photographer. Alfred Eisenstaedt
• It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter. Alfred Eisenstaedt

.

Life is a camera and your heart is the shutter

• Life is like a camera… Focus on what’s important. Capture the good times.  Develop from the negatives.  And if things don’t work out, take another shot.
• Life is your art. An open, aware heart is your camera. A oneness with your world is your film. Your bright eyes, your easy smile is your museum. Ansel Adams
• Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness. Yousuf Karsh

.

Results in photography are always uncertain

• I never have taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse. Diane Arbus
• Results are uncertain even among the more experienced photographers. Matthew Brady

.

Shake up the familiar

• If I saw something in my viewfinder that looked familiar to me, I would do something to shake it up. Garry Winogrand
• The two most engaging powers of a photograph are to make new things familiar and familiar things new. William Thackeray

.

Thoughts on photographing people

• Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people – to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual. Nickolas Muray
• Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. Oscar Wilde
• My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph. Richard Avedon
• I just think it’s important to be direct and honest with people about why you’re photographing them and what you’re doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul.  Mary Ellen Mark
• When you photograph people in colour you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in B&W, you photograph their souls!  Ted Grant
• It’s one thing to make a picture of what a person looks like, it’s another thing to make a portrait of who they are. Paul Caponigro
• Most of my photos are grounded in people, I look for the unguarded moment, the essential soul peeking out, experience etched on a person’s face. Steve McCurry
• It’s not the photographer that makes the picture, but the person being photographed. Sebastiao Salgado
• When you photograph a face . . .you photograph the soul behind it. Jean-Luc Godard
• 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
• People don’t have time to wait for somebody to paint their portraits anymore. The money is in photography. Robert Mapplethorpe

.

Thoughts on photo editing

• The negative is the equivalent of the composer’s score, and the print the performance. Ansel Adams
• Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships. Ansel Adams
• For me the printing process is part of the magic of photography. It’s that magic that can be exciting, disappointing, rewarding and frustrating all in the same few moments in the darkroom. John Sexton
• I do not object to retouching, dodging or accentuation as long as they do not interfere with the natural qualities of photographic technique. Alfred Stieglitz

.

Thoughts on sharpness

• There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept. Ansel Adams
• Every time someone tells me how sharp my photos are, I assume that it isn’t a very interesting photograph. If it were, they would have more to say.
• 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.
• Sharpness is a bourgeois concept. Henri Cartier-Bresson

.

Thoughts on photography and painting

• The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. Susan Sonrag
• Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs. Ansel Adams
• In every photographer there was a painter, a true artist, awaiting expression. Pablo Picasso
• Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper… the photographer begins with the finished product. Edward Steichen
• 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 ordinary. David Bailey
• Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation. Henri Cartier-Bresson

.

Thoughts on landscape photography

• Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer – and often the supreme disappointment. Ansel Adams
• Landscape photographers are crepuscular creatures, we tend to function most creatively at twilight, be it dawn or dusk. Pete Bridgwood

.

Thoughts on street photography

• I only know how to approach a place by walking. For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown, or the secret heat of the known awaits just around the corner. Alex Webb
• Buy a good pair of comfortable shoes, have a camera around your neck at all times, keep your elbows in, be patient, optimistic and don’t forget to smile. Matt Stuart
• To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event. Henri Cartier- Bresson

.

Thoughts on black and white photography

• 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 statement demands certainty… absolute certainty. Paul Outerbridge
• When you photograph people in colour you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in B&W, you photograph their souls!  Ted Grant

.

Thoughts on color

• In my photography, color and composition are inseparable. I see in color. William Albert Allard
• Color in a picture is like enthusiasm in Life. Vincent van Gogh
• Colour

.

• A photograph is memory in the raw. Carrie Latet
• A photograph is the pause button on life. Ty Holland
• All those years of getting horrible elementary school pictures was just society’s way of preparing you for your driver’s license photo.
• Anything more than 500 yards from the car just isn’t photogenic. Edward Weston
• Everyone has a photographic memory, but not everyone has film.
• Good photos are like good jokes. If you have to explain it, it just isn’t that good.
• He has a photographic memory but with the lens cover glued on.
• I believe in equality for everyone except reporters and photographers. Mohandas Gandhi
• I drifted into photography like one drifts into prostitution. First I did it to please myself, then I did it to please my friends, and eventually I did it for the money. Philippe Halsman
• I have an underwater camera just in case I crash my car into a river and at the last minute I see a photo opportunity of a fish that I have never seen. Mitch Hedberg
• I shutter to think how many people are underexposed and lacking depth in this field. Rick Steves
• I was never a photogenic person, because when everyone said cheese I said “WHERE”?
• If you found yourself in a situation where you could either save a drowning man or you could take a Pulitzer prize winning photograph of him drowning what shutter speed and setting would you use? Paul Harvey
• My photographs don’t do me justice; they just look like me. Phyllis Diller
• Overall, I’d say my career as a photographer has been a bit of a blur. Milton Jones
• Photograph: A picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. Ambrose Bierce
• Photography, like alcohol, should only be allowed to those who can do without it. Walter Sickert
• Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies Diane Arbus
• The best shots are generally attempted through the lens cap. Second Law of Photography
• There are no bad pictures; that’s just how your face looks sometimes.
• Today everything exists to end in a photograph. Susan Sonrag
• When you look like your passport photo it’s time to go home. Erma Bombeck
• Which of my photographs is my favourite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow. Imogen Cunningham
• You can’t photoshop your ugly personality.
• Your birth certificate says you were born. Your death certificate says you died. Your photographs say you lived.

.

.