Check out our list of 50 inspiring and powerful quotes on photography from celebrated artists and photographers. Find inspiration to bust out your camera and take the best photos of your life!
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“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”
Ansel Adams
“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”
Dorothea Lange
“Nature is beautiful in all its chaos. However, a nature photograph is beautiful only in the absence of chaos.”
Mike MacDonald
“The thing I love about photography is that for just a moment, you can make everyone else look at the world the way you see it.”
Amy Spalding, The Summer of Jordi Perez
“There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.”
Ansel Adams
“The good photo settles in your eye; the better photo settles in your mind, but the best photo settles in your heart!”
Mehmet Murat Ildan
“What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.”
Karl Lagerfeld
“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.”
Henri Cartier-Bresson
“A photograph is a biography of a moment.”
Art Shay
“My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, or the camera’s eye may entirely change my idea.”
Edward Weston
“A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.”
Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
“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
“A photograph is the pause button on life.”
Ty Holland
“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
“The Earth is Art, The Photographer is only a Witness”
Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Earth from Above
“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
“Photography saved my life by opening my eyes to the beauty that surrounds me each and everyday. Life look much richer from behind the lens.”
Donna Kasubeck
“Sometimes I arrive just when God’s ready to have somone click the shutter.”
Ansel Adams
“Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.”
Marc Riboud
“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”
Ansel Adams
“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, The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers
“Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.”
Alfred Stieglitz
“When you’re taking photographs of people, creating the “perfect scenery” is always secondary. It’s much more important to capture the emotions. Especially when there’s true love.”
Nina Hrusa
“Buying a new camera “because it takes great photos” is like buying a paint brush “because it paints great paintings.” The REAL key is learning how to USE your camera to create great images.”
Kevin Gourley, 30 Practical Tips for Better Photographs
“You can’t take a perfect photo without perfect timing!”
Mehmet Murat ildan
“Whatever the intention or aim of the photographer, every photograph is a unique proof of identify, firmly declaring that human beings are ghosts.”
Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day
“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”
Susan Sontag, On Photography
“We tell stories using light. We tell stories using shadows. That’s it.”
Merlin Schönfisch
“I like to think of my photography as a two-hour movie in one frame.”
Jon Luvelli
“Photographs are just light and time”
John Green, Turtles All the Way Down
“I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.”
Diane Arbus
“Every time we raise the camera to our eyes, we become morally responsible to “the photographed” as well as the viewers. Photography cannot be just a privilege, it’s a responsibility that should not be abdicated.”
Neeta Satam
“A camera is just a tool, and you’re a tool if you’re worried about what camera you are using.”
Jon Luvelli
“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
“A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true.”
Don DeLillo, Underworld
“The context in which a photograph is seen affects the meaning the viewer draws from it.”
Stephen Shore, Ed.D.
“I guess I like the idea of capturing time. It never stops. It’s always slipping through our fingers. Photography is my way of trying to slow it down, you know?”
Chloe Fowler
“Photography is not only an art, it is an international language that everybody understands.”
NasserTone
“I grew up looking at National Geographic. I always wondered who was taking the photos and how.”
Jimmy Chin
“Photography captures a moment in time. Art captures time in a moment.”
Joyce Wycoff
“When burdened by the feeling that there are too many photographs in the world, I ask myself if there are too many flowers.”
Alec Soth, A Pound of Pictures
“We photographers are a despicable bunch. We take photographs. The best of us do not show people as they wish to be seen, instead, we show people as we imagine they really are.”
Waswo X. Waswo, India Poems: The Photographs
“It’s not when you press the shutter, but why you press the shutter.”
Mary Ellen Mark
“The photographs that excite me are photographs that say something in a new manner; not for the sake of being different but ones that are different because the individual is different and the individual expresses himself.”
Harry Callahan
“Painting is the mother of Photography”
Biju Karakkonam, Nature and Wildlife Photographer
“Photography is inescapably a memorial art. It selects, out of the flow of time, a moment to be preserved, with the moments before and after falling away like sheer cliffs.”
Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays
“One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.”
Minor White
“Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper. the photographer begins with the finished product”
Edward Steichen
“All the technique in the world doesn’t compensate for the inability to notice”
Elliott Erwitt
“It’s all about taming the light.”
Adrian Leslie Lobo
Grab your camera and get out into the world; If this list of photography quotes doesn’t have you inspired…read it again!
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