Looking for inspirational photography quotes, then this post is for you. Here we have gathered the best 140 photography quotes from some of the most famous artists, photographers, filmmakers, authors and illustrators. These quotes will help you stay motivated and inspired, especially when you will feel disoriented or stressed at work. The ones who have given these quotes have gone through similar challenges in their lives. These photography quotes are not only inspirational but also they are timeless.
Have a look…….
1. “The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?” – Edward Weston
2. “On the odd days Auto Tone gets it right I assume it’s using some kind of voodoo.” – David duChemin
3. “There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.” – Ansel Adams
4. “The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.” – Steven Pinker
5. “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” – Robert Capa
6. “The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.” – Susan Sontag
7. “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
8. “Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
9. “To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk.” – Edward Weston
10. “To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
11. “It’s amazing how photography can capture just a split second of something exquisite.” – Kiera Cass
12. “Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
13. “Sharpness is a bourgeois concept.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
14. “Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.” – David Alan Harvey
15. “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 Miro
16. “What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.” – Roland Barthes
17. “My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.” – Steve McCurry
18. “Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.” – Ansel Adams
19. “The advent of the digital age and the immediacy and convenience of digital video and photography allows people to become an integral part of the feedback loop, which actively shapes the content we are fed.” – Damian Loeb
20. “What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.” – Karl Lagerfeld
21. “Photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future.” – Sally Mann
22. “I don’t trust words. I trust pictures.” – Gilles Peress
23. “I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.” – Mahatma Gandhi
24. “A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.” – George Bernard Shaw
25. “There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph.” – Robert Heinecken
26. “All the planning, intuition, technical prowess, and knowledge, as well as the trust and rapport you have (or haven’t) established, will show up in the picture, frozen forever.” – Gregory Heisler
27. “Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality…One can’t possess reality, one can possess images–one can’t possess the present but one can possess the past.” – Susan Sontag
28. “The world moves fast, changing everything around us with each new day. Photography is a gift that can keep us in a moment forever, blissfully eternal.” – Ali Novak
29. “Only photograph what you love.” – Tim Walker
30. “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
31. “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” – Dorothea Lange
32. “A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.” – Diane Arbus
33. “It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.” – Alfred Eisenstaedt
34. “To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk.” – Edward Weston
35. “A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective.” – Irving Penn
36. “The eye should learn to listen before it looks.” – Robert Frank
37. “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, and the people you have loved.” – Ansel Adams
38. “In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.” – August Sander
39. “Work very hard, until you don’t have to introduce yourself anymore.” – Roberto Vazquez
40. It’s weird that photographers spend years or even a whole lifetime, trying to capture moments that added together, don’t even amount to a couple of hours.” – James Lalropui Keivom
41. “Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, and eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.” – Walker Evans
42. “The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.” – Andy Warhol
43. “It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.” – Alfred Eisenstaedt
44. “Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.” – Alfred Stieglitz
45. “When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I’d like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.” – Annie Leibovitz
46. “There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.” – Ansel Adams
47. “Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.” – Joe McNally
48. “I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost.” – Nan Goldin
49. “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
50. “Photography helps people to see.” – Berenice Abbott
51. “Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell.” – Kim Edwards
52. “Photography has no rules, it is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it is achieved.” – Bill Brandt
53. “I wish that all of nature’s magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed.” – Annie Leibovitz
54. “We are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us.” – Ralph Hattersley
55. “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
56. “Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
57. “The pictures are there, and you just take them.” – Robert Capa
58. “Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.” – David Alan Harvey
59. “Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.” – Peter Adams
60. “I walk, I look, I see, I stop, I photograph.” – Leon Levinstein
61. “Yes, it took me just a moment to draw this line with the brush. But it took me months, perhaps even years, of reflection to form the idea.” – Joan Miró
62. “No, you don’t shoot things. You capture them. Photography means painting with light. And that’s what you do. You paint a picture only by adding light to the things you see.” – Katja Michael
63. “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
64. “The camera has always been a guide, and it’s allowed me to see things and focus on things that may be an average person wouldn’t even notice.” – Don Chadwick
65. Photography is the beauty of life captured.” – Tara Chisolm
66. “There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.” – Robert Frank
67. “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
68. “We don’t learn from our good images; we learn from the ones that can be improved on.” – Jen Rozenbaum
69. 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 Siskind
70. “The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it!” – Ansel Adams
71. “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
72. Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.” – David Alan Harvey
73. “Above all, life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference.” – Robert Frank
74. “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 Miro
75. “Anyone can take a picture of poverty; it’s easy to focus on the dirt and hurt of the poor. It’s much harder—and much more needful—to pry under that dirt and reveal the beauty and dignity of people that, but for their birth into a place and circumstance different from our own, are just like ourselves. I want my images to tell the story of those people and to move us beyond pity to justice and mercy.” – David duChemin
76. “My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.” – Richard Avedon
77. “Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.” – Imogen Cunningham
78. “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
79. “The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.” – Elliott Erwitt
80. “Sometimes one waits too long for the perfect moment before snapping the picture. You never realize that you needed was to change perspective.” – Miguel Syjuco
81. “There are no bad pictures; that’s just how your face looks sometimes.” – Abraham Lincoln
82. “Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.” – Marc Riboud
83. “Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.” – Paul Strand
84. “To me, a photograph means the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the meaning of an event on the one hand and the exact arrangement of the visually perceived forms expressing that event on the other.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
85. “Fear is the thing that prohibits a lot of photographers from reaching their full potential.” – Collin Pierson
86. “You don’t take pictures, they take you.” – Jay Maysel
87. “For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.” – Diane Arbus
88. “A good photograph is knowing where to stand.” – Ansel Adams
89. “Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy that doesn’t look like somebody else’s work.” – William Klein
90. “My ultimate goal is to try to make the ordinary look extraordinary.” – Martin Parr
91. “For me, documentary photography has always come with great responsibility. Not just to tell the story honestly and with empathy, but also to make sure the right people hear it. When you photograph somebody who is in pain or discomfort, they trust you to make sure the images will act as their advocate.” –Giles Duley
92. “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” – Ansel Adams
93. “The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.” – Orson Welles
94. “In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” – Andy Warhol
95. “A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.” – Edward Steichen
96. “If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff.” – Jim Richardson
97. “I like to photograph anyone before they know what their best angles are.” – Ellen von Unwerth
98. “A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.” – Eudora Welty
99. “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.” – Ansel Adams
100. “For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
101. “I think of photography like therapy.” – Harry Gruyaert
102. “Photography is the story I fail to put into words.” – Destin Sparks
103. “Without vision, the photographer perishes.” – David duChemin
104. “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
105. “I think good dreaming is what leads to good photographs.” – Wayne Miller
106. “What I have learnt and what I teach now is all about experimentation and learning to pick yourself up and try again when you fall down.” – Lara Jade
107. “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
108. “You cannot possibly hit the shutter without leaving a piece of you in the image.” – Joe Buissink
109. “If you can smell the street by looking at the photo, it’s a street photograph.” – Bruce Gilden
110. “Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” – Susan Sontag
111. “Whatever happens in front of the lens stays. What’s captured during the encounter is all that exists.” – Gregory Heisler
112. “In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.” – Alfred Stieglitz
113. “What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.” – Karl Lagerfeld
114. “Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.” – Marc Riboud
115. “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate I shall be content with silence.” – Ansel Adams
116. “If Photoshop is the answer, you’re asking the wrong question.” – Dean Farrell
117. “A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.” – Annie Leibovitz
118. 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
119. “Photographers, like few other kinds of artists I can imagine, have an insanely personal relationship with their gear.” – David duChemin
120. “A camera is a SAVE button for the mind’s eye.” – Roger Kingston
121. “It’s not enough to just own a camera. Everyone owns a camera. To be a photographer, you must understand, appreciate, and harness the power you hold!” – Mark Denman
122. “Die knowing something. You’re not here long.” – Walker Evans
123. “Art is what we call…the thing an artist does. It’s not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making! Something risky. Something human. Art is not in the …eye of the beholder. It’s in the soul of the artist.” – Seth Godin
124. “A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.” – Ansel Adams
125. “If you see something that moves you, and then snap it, you keep a moment.” – Linda McCartney
126. “Technology has eliminated the basement darkroom and the whole notion of photography as an intense labor of love for obsessives and replaced them with a sense of immediacy and instant gratification.” – Joe McNally
127. “Wherever there is light, one can photograph.” – Alfred Stieglitz
128. “The best camera is the one you have with you.” – Chase Jarvis
129. “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
130. “If I have any ‘message’ worth giving to a beginner it is that there are no shortcuts in photography.” – Edward Weston
131. “There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” – Ansel Adams
132. “The cliché comes not in what you shoot but in how you shoot it.” – David duChemin
133. “A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you.” – Brigitte Bardot
134. “A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.” – Eudora Welty
135. “You are responsible for every element within the frame.” – David duChemin
136. A photographer is defined as much by what he or she decides not to photograph as by what is photographed.” – Jack Dykinga
137. “Regarding the creative: never assume you’re the master, only the student. Your audience will determine if you’re masterful.” – Don Roff
138. “Above all, life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference.” – Robert Frank
139. “The two most engaging powers of a photograph are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.” – William Thackeray
140. “You know, I really don’t think you learn from teachers. You learn from work. I think what you learn, really, is how to be- you have to be your own toughest critic, and you only learn that from work, from seeing work.” – Garry Winogrand
Read these photography quotes whenever you feel like, and stay motivated!!
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