Photography Quotes
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The camera creates a magical transformation. It's not enough to exist; we must chronicle that existence. ... Narrative- and image-making creatures like humans don't feel any experience is complete unless it's recorded.
Erica Jong
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Photography is without mercy - though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.
Nick Harkaway
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Photography does not form a separate, barren field of art. It is only a means of execution, uniform, rapid and sure, which serves the artist by reproducing with mathematical precision the form and effect of objects and even that poetry which at once arises from any harmonious combination.
Charles Negre
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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.
Ansel Adams
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At birth we begin to discover that shapes, sounds, lights, and textures have meaning. Long before we learn to talk, sounds and images form the world we live in. All our lives, that world is more immediate than words and difficult to articulate. Photography, reflecting those images with uncanny accuracy, evokes their associations and our instant conviction. The art of the photographer lies in using those connotations, as a poet uses the connotations of words and a musician the tonal connotations of sounds.
Nancy Newhall
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Photography has always been important to me for that, being able to make sense of something or understand something or remember something or laugh at something.
Nick Zinner
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I really don't have any idea about photography, but I take pictures.
Alex Majoli
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I don't need the money I generate from photography to support myself.
Kim Weston
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[Photography] remains servile to a thoughtless vision of the world... As the term snapshot suggests, photography seizes the moment and exhibits it.
Claude Levi-Strauss
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I think there's a general confusion that my work is about types of photography. But really that's just a tool to introduce some questions I have about seeing. What happens when all of these conditions and structures and histories and cultures and tools you have around you begin to fail? On the one hand there is an engagement with histories and cultures, and on the other, there is this very lonesome space of actually coming to terms with seeing.
Elad Lassry
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And one has to remember that no photography can pretend to show the truth. A picture only shows a given situation under a very specific perspective, consciously or not, openly or not, relevantly or not. Photographers have to accept they can just convey fragments of illusory realities and relate their own intimate experience of the world. In this process of fictionalising an unreachable truth, it's up to them to impose their doubts about any photographic truth, or accept being impotent pawns in the mediatic game.
Antoine D'Agata
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The language that photography has is a formal language. Any photographer is doing something formal. If it's formal, then it must be an aesthetic way to communicate.
Sebastiao Salgado
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The biggest cliche in Photography is Sunrise and Sunset.
Catherine Opie
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Wilderness, to me, is a spiritual necessity. The mysterious spiritual experience of being close to natural restored my soul after the death of his son. My experience reinforced by dedication to use the art of photography as an inspiration for others to work together to save nature's places of spiritual sanctuary for future generations.
Clyde Butcher
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You know, you get into the business of commercial photography, and that's all you do is photograph what you know. That's what you're hired for.
Garry Winogrand
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There is a terrible truthfulness about photography that sometimes makes a thing look ridiculous.
George Bernard Shaw
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Photography is nature seen from the eyes outward, painting from the eyes inward. Photography records inalterably the single image, while painting records a plurality of images willfully directed by the artist.
Charles Sheeler
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The dismal half-baked images of the average "reportage" and "documentary" photography are self dammning... the slick manner, the slightly obscure significance, the esoteric fear of simple beauty for its own sake - I am deeply concerned with these manifestations of decay. Gene Smith's work validates my most vigorous convictions that if the documentary photographs is to be truly effective it must contain elements of art, intensity, fine craft and spirituality. All these his work contains and we may turn to his work with gratitude, appreciation and great respect.
Ansel Adams
