Photography Quotes

What follows is a great collection of photography quotes. We will continue to update these over time.

“The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it.”
– Ansel Adams

“If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”
- Robert Capa

“You don’t take a photograph. You ask, quietly, to borrow it”
- Author Unknown

“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know”
- Diane Arbus

“There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs”
- Ansel Adams

“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

“There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.”
- Ansel Adams

“Results are uncertain even among the more experienced photographers.”
- Matthew Brady

“The negative is the equivalent of the composer’s score and the print the performance.”
- 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

“Buying a Nikon doesn’t make you a photographer. it makes you a Nikon owner.”
- Author Unknown

“A photograph is like a recipe- a memory the finished dish.”
- Carrie Latet

“You don’t take a photograph, you make it. -Ansel Adams

“In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality”
- Alfred Stieglitz

“The two most engaging powers of a photograph are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.”
- William Thackeray

“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

“When you photograph a face . . .you photograph the soul behind it.”
- Jean -Luc Godard

“The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world”
- Orson Welles

“If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera.”
- Lewis Hine

“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

“Kodak sells film, but they don’t advertise film; they advertise memories”
- Theodore Levitt

“The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it? -Edward Weston

“Once photography enters your bloodstream, it is like a disease.”
- Anonymous

“Photography has no rules, it is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it is achieved.”
- Bill Brandt

“Character, like photograph, develops in darkness.”
- Yousuf Karsh #photography #quote

“Photography is the art of frozen time… the ability to store emotion and feelings within a frame”
- Meshack Otieno

“Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real”
- Ansel Adams

“Photography is the recording of strangeness and beauty with beguiling precision”
- Sebastian Smee

“Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality”
- Alfred Stieglitz

“Photography is the dominant and fascinating and only folk art of the twentieth century”
- Sir John Rothenstein

“Photography is (a means by which we)…learn to see the ordinary”
- David Bailey

“Photography is a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing. The contest can be held anywhere …”
- John Szarkowski

“Photography is my meditation”
- Czar Anthony Lopez

“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.”
- Eliot Porter

“Photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression.”
- henri Cartier-Bresson

“There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.”
-Ansel Adams

“My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, or the camera’s eye may entirely change my idea.”
-Edward Weston

“Be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence.”
-Minor White

“Which of the photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.”
-Imogen Cunningham

“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

“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

“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.”
-Henri Cartier-Bresson

“There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph.”
-Robert Heinecken

“If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera.”
-Lewis Hine

“Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.”
-Yousuf Karsh

“Photography is truth.”
-Jean-Luc Godard

“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

“When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear.”
-Alfred Eisenstaedt

“It is always the instantaneous reaction to oneself that produces a photograph.”
-Robert Frank

“The subject matter is so much more important than the photographer”
- Gordon Parks

“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

“At 42, I decided to become a photographer because it offered a means of creative thought and action. I didn’t rationalize this, I just felt it intuitively and followed my intuition, which I have never regretted.”
-Wynne Bullock

“I’ve never made any picture, good or bad, without paying for it in emotional turmoil.”
-W. Eugene Smith

“Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.”
-Berenice Abbott

“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

“Photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future.”
-Sally Mann

The photo above is by SweetonVeg