“If your photos aren’t good enough, then you’re not close enough.”
— Robert Capa
“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”
— Ansel Adams
“In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.”
— Alfred Stieglitz
“There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.”
— Robert Frank
“Taking an image, freezing a moment, reveals how rich reality truly is.”
— Anonymous
“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
“When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear.”
— Alfred Eisenstaedt
An illustration with a quote by photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt
Photograph by Jennifer Trovato
“We are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us.”
— Ralph Hattersley
“A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.”
— Annie Leibovitz
“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
“You don’t take a photograph. You ask quietly to borrow it.”
— Unknown
“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
“If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph.”
— Ansel Adams
“A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.”
— Edward Steichen
“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
“The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.”
— Andy Warhol
“Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.”
— Diane Arbus
“What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are time and light.”
— John Berger
An illustration with a quote by photographer John Berger
“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
“The picture that you took with your camera is the imagination you want to create with reality.”
— Scott Lorenzo
“If the photographer is interested in the people in front of his lens, and if he is compassionate, it’s already a lot. The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.”
— Eve Arnold
“A tear contains an ocean. A photographer is aware of the tiny moments in a persons life that reveal greater truths.”
— Anonymous
“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”
— Dorothea Lange
“Essentially what photography is is life lit up.”
— Sam Abell
“…we are there with our cameras to record reality. Once we start modifying that which exists, we are robbing photography of its most valuable attribute.”
— Philip Jones Griffiths
“I don’t trust words. I trust pictures.”
— Gilles Peress
“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
“I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.”
— Diane Arbus
“It’s about reacting to what you see, hopefully without preconception. You can find pictures anywhere. It’s simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what’s around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy.”
— Elliott Erwitt
“Photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future.”
— Sally Mann
An illustration with a quote by photographer Sally Mann
“Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.”
— Marc Riboud
“It’s more important for a photographer to have very good shoes, than to have a very good camera.”
— Sebastiao Salgado
“Once you learn to care, you can record images with your mind or on film. There is no difference between the two.”
— Anonymous
“Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.”
— Ambrose Bierce
“Every artist has a central story to tell, and the difficulty, the impossible task, is trying to present that story in pictures.”
— Gregory Crewdson
“Photography is truth.”
— Jean-Luc Godard
“Photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the photo as a judgment that the photograph is good.”
— Garry Winogrand
“Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.”
— Berenice Abbott
“The pictures are there, and you just take them.”
— Robert Capa
“Photography has nothing to do with cameras.”
— Lucas Gentry
An illustration with a quote by photographer Lucas Gentry
“The camera makes you forget you’re there. It’s not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much.”
— Annie Leibovitz
“If you see something that moves you, and then snap it, you keep a moment.”
— Linda McCartney
“There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.”
— Ansel Adams
“The more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.”
— Robert Mapplethorpe
“I am not interested in shooting new things – I am interested to see things new.”
— Ernst Haas
“Photography to me is catching a moment which is passing, and which is true.”
— Jacques-Henri Lartigue
“Photography is the story I fail to put into words.”
— Destin Sparks
“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”
— Diane Arbus
“A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.”
— Eudora Welty
“If you are out there shooting, things will happen for you. If you’re not out there, you’ll only hear about it.”
— Jay Maisel
“It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera… they are made with the eye, heart and head.”
— Henri Cartier-Bresson
“The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.”
— Elliott Erwitt
“It’s not the photographer who makes the picture, but the person being photographed.”
— Sebastiao Salgado
“Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn’t look like somebody else’s work.”
— William Klein
“To know ahead of time what you’re looking for means you’re then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting, and often false.”
— Dorothea Lange
“One doesn’t stop seeing. One doesn’t stop framing. It doesn’t turn off and turn on. It’s on all the time.”
— Annie Leibovitz
“Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.”
— Dorothea Lange
An illustration with a quote by photographer Dorothea Lange
“What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.”
— Karl Lagerfeld
“No place is boring, if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.”
— Robert Adams
“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
“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
“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
“Wherever there is light, one can photograph.”
— Alfred Stieglitz
“Since I’m inarticulate, I express myself with images.”
— Helen Levitt
Photography Quotes
