Photography is just a single word, but this single word carries lots of meaning. Emotions, memories, passion, experience, and so many things are a part of photography. There are so many established and world-famous photographers who gave a lot of valuable speeches. Those speeches help new photographers to become successful. Those words motivate them. In this article, we are going to introduce an additional 200 quotes from the world-famous photographer.
- “Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson.
- “You don’t take a photograph; you make it.” — Ansel Adams.
- “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” —Robert Capa.
- “A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.” — Annie Leibovitz.
- “The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.” — Andy Warhol.
- “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.
- “What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.” —.Karl Lagerfeld
- “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.
- “There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.” — Robert Frank.
- “Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.” — Diane Arbus.
- “Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.” — Duane Michals.
- “If I have any ‘message’ worth giving to a beginner, it is that there are no shortcuts in photography.” — Edward Weston.
- “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.
- “Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.” — Marc Riboud.
- “It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.” — Alfred Eisenstaedt.
- “Taking an image, freezing a moment, reveals how rich reality truly is.” — Anonythe mouse.
- “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.
- “We are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us.” — Ralph Hattersley.
- “In the world of photography, you get to share a captured moment with other people.” — James Wilson.
- “Photography helps people to see.” — Berenice Abbott.
- “You know, I don’t think you learn from teachers. You learn from work. I think what you learn is how to be – you have to be your own toughest critic, and you only learn that from work, from seeing work.” — Garry Winogrand.
- “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.
- “Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something; even it is clumsy, that doesn’t look like somebody else’s work.” — William Klein.
- “If you can smell the street by looking at the photo, it’s a street photograph.” — Bruce Gilden.
- “One should use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.” — Dorothea Lange.
- “If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.” — Eve Arnold.
- “If you photograph for a long time, you get to understand such things as body language. I often do not look at people I photograph, especially afterward. Also, when I want a photo, I become somewhat fearless, and this helps a lot. There will always be someone who objects to being photographed, and when this happens, you move on.” — Martin Parr.
- “If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff.” — Jim Richardson.
- “To me, photography must suggest, not insist or explain.” — Brassai.
- “A good photograph 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.
- “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.
- “A camera alone does not make a picture. To make a picture, you need a camera, a photographer and above all a subject. It is the subject that determines the interest of the photograph.” — Man Ray.
- “A good photographer records; a great photographer reveals.” — Skyler Reid.
- “What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.” — John Berger.
- “Beauty can be seen in all things; seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.” — Matt Hardy.
- “Weirdly, 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.
- “The golden rule is to work fast. As for framing, composition, focus – this is no time to start asking yourself questions: you just have to trust your intuition and the sharpness of your reflexes.” — Jacques-Henri Lartigue.
- “The artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.” — Paul Strand.
- “After following the crowd for a while, I’d then go 180 degrees in the exact opposite direction. It always worked for me.” — Elliott Erwitt.
- “Don’t shoot what it looks like before. Shoot what it feels like.” — David Alan Harvey.
- “It’s important to take bad pictures. It’s the bad ones that have to do with what you’ve never done before. They can make you recognize something you hadn’t seen in a way that will make you recognize it when you see it again.” — Diane Arbus.
- “Today, I am going to shoot someone…, and they will love me for it!” — Anonymous.
- “The picture that you took with your camera is the imagination you want to create with reality.” — Scott Lorenzo.
- “I don’t trust words. I trust pictures.” — Gilles Peress
- “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” — Dorothea Lange.
- “All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.” — Richard Avedon.
- “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.
- “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.” — Ansel Adams
- “Great photography is about the depth of feeling, not the depth of field.” — Peter Adams.
- “For me, the camera is a sketchbook, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.” ― Henri Cartier-Bresson.
- “The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don’t belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation.” — Susan Meiselas.
- “I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. My pictures show me how much I’ve lost.” ― Nan Goldin.
- “A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.” — Edward Steichen.
- “If you see something that moves you, and then snap it, you keep a moment.” — Linda McCartney.
- “Which of the photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.” — Imogen Cunningham
- “Above all, life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference.” ― Robert Frank.
- “Buying a Nikon doesn’t make you a photographer. It makes you a Nikon owner.” — Anonymous.
- “Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who sees.” ― Paul Strand.
- “The pictures are there, and you just take them.” — Robert Capa.
- “Photograph the world as it is. Nothing’s more interesting than reality.” — Mary Ellen Mark.
- “Photography has no rules; it is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it is achieved.” — Bill Brandt.
- “The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?” —Edward Weston.
- “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.
- “The two most engaging powers of a photograph are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.” — William Thackeray.
- “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.
- “When people ask me what equipment I use – I tell them my eyes.” — Anonymous.
- “If a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it’s as though I’ve neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up.” — Richard Avedon.
- “Photography to me is catching a moment which is passing, and which is true.” — Jacques-Henri Lartigue.
- “To me, the magic of photography, per se, is that you can capture an instant of a second that couldn’t exist before and couldn’t exist after. It’s almost like a cowboy that draws his gun. You draw a second before or after, you miss, and you’re dead – not them. To me, photography’s always like that.” — Mario Testino.
- “Photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future.” — Sally Mann.
- “There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.” — Ansel Adams.
- “Once photography enters your bloodstream, it is like a disease.” — Anonymous.
- “When I photograph, what I’m doing is seeking answers to things.” — Wynn Bullock.
- “It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography, everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.” — David Bailey.
- “I didn’t choose photography; photography chose me.” — Gerardo Suter.
- “There’s a time when people say your work is revolutionary, but you have to keep being revolutionary. I can’t keep shooting pop stars all my life. You have to keep changing, keep pushing yourself, looking for the new, the unusual.” — Rankin.
- “Photography is not about cameras, gadgets, and gizmos. Photography is about photographers. A camera didn’t make a great picture any more than a typewriter wrote a great novel.” — Peter Adams.
- “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.
- “My interest in photography is not to capture an image I see or even have in my mind, but to explore the potential of moments I can only begin to imagine.” — Lois Greenfield.
- “The camera is much more than a recording apparatus; it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.” — Orson Welles.
- “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.
- “The more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.” — Robert Mapplethorpe
- “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 observed.” — Galen Rowell.
- “I think life is too short not to be doing something which you believe in.” — Steve McCurry.
- “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.” — Diane Arbus
- “Essentially what photography is life lit up.” — Sam Abell
- “One doesn’t stop seeing. One doesn’t stop framing. It doesn’t turn off and on. It’s on all the time.” — Annie Leibovitz.
- “Photography allows you to use your sensibility and everything you are to say something about and be part of the world around you. In this way, you might discover who you are, and with a little luck, you might discover something much larger than yourself.” — Peter Lindbergh.
- “When you photograph a face… you photograph the soul behind it.” — Jean-Luc Godard.
- “I think of photography like therapy.” — Harry Gruyaert.
- “You’ve got to push yourself harder. You’ve got to start looking for pictures nobody else could take. You’ve got to take the tools you have and probe deeper.” — William Albert Allard.
- “Photography is like a moment, an instant. You need a half-second to get the photo. So it’s good to capture people when they are themselves.” — Patrick Demarchelier.
- “I love the people I photograph. I mean, they’re my friends. I’ve never met most of them, or I don’t know them at all, yet through my images, I live with them.” — Bruce Gilden.
- “No place is boring if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and a pocket full of unexposed film.” — Robert Adams.
- “I threw myself into this artform because photography had given me a new sense of mission and identity.” — Bob Anderson.
- “The eye should learn to listen before it looks.” — Robert Frank.
- “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
- “Photography is a small voice, at best, but sometimes one photograph, or a group of them, can lure our sense of awareness.” — W. Eugene Smith
- “Only photograph what you love.” — Tim Walker.
- “Photography is a love affair with life.” — Burk Uzzle.
- “Photography is the story I fail to put into words.”- Destin Sparks.
- “We will start from one of my most favorite quotes from the photography legend’, Ansel Adams
- “There are no rules for good photographs; there are only good photographs,” Ansel Adams
- “A good photograph can grab the viewer’s attention and bring out their emotions,” there is no secret recipe or a universal rule to make a lousy picture look instantly better.
- “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough,” Robert Capa.
- “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.
- “To photograph: it is to put the head, the eye, and the heart on the same line of sight,” Henri Cartier-Bresson.
- Another famous quote from Ansel Adams summarises what goes into making a photograph.
- “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.
- “So true – each photograph we make reflects who we are and our experiences in our lives!” Edward Weston.
- “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
- “I love the following quote from one of my most favorite portrait photographers,” Gregory Heisler.
- “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
- “Another quote from my favorite portrait and landscape photographer and a dear friend,” Jack Dykinga.
- “A photojournalist makes snap decisions; based on assessing situations and recording one’s perceived truth quickly.”, Jack Dykinga.
- “If you haven’t had a chance to read his “A Photographer’s Life” book, I highly recommend checking it out. You will be fascinated by Jack’s life story and what it took to become who he is today.” Jack Dykinga.
- “I like photographs because they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.”, said Karl Lagerfeld.
- “When you photograph people in color realize, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!”, Ted Grant.
- “A picture is a secret about a secret; the more it tells you, the less you know.”, Diane Arbus.
- “All photographs are memento mori. To take a picture is participating 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.
- “Whenever anyone tells you that you don’t have the right camera gear, always refer them to this particular,” Ansel Adams:
- “The single most crucial component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it!” Ansel Adams
- “While camera gear is essential, the photographer makes a picture at the end of the day, not the camera.” Adda Loveless.
- An excellent quote from Henri Cartier-Bresson that refers to the “ten thousand rule”:
- “Photography is an art,” Deidara Sempai.
- “A true photography is an explosion.”, Henri Cartier-Bresson.
- “For me, the camera is a sketchbook, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.” Henri Cartier-Bresson
- “When people look at my pictures, I want them to feel the way they do when they read a line of a poem twice.” Robert Frank
- The following is a quote from one of the pages of David duChemin’s excellent book “Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision. “
- “Without vision, the photographer perishes.” David duChemin
- “Many photographers have a lot about photographic vision, but this one is short and right to the point.” Itachi Uchiha.
- “You see in my pictures that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.” Annie Leibovitz
- “Photography is all about secrets—the secrets we all have and will never tell.” Kim Edwards.
- “Photography is not for you if it is not your passion.” Ansel Adams.
- “There is a clear difference between taking a picture (which often results in nothing more than a snapshot) and making a picture – where you put all effort into it, from the moment you capture the image to post-processing.” Ansel Adams.
- “You don’t take a photograph; you make it.” Ansel Adams.
- “There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph.” Robert Heinecken.
- “As photographers, we want the latest and greatest gear to get the sharpest picture possible. The following quote by Henri Cartier-Bresson says that sharpness is not all that important. Sharpness is a bourgeois concept.” Henri Cartier-Bresson.
- Here is another quote by Ansel Adams on other factors being more important than just sharpness. “ There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” Ansel Adams.
- “The eye should learn to listen before it looks.” Robert Frank.
- “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.
- “Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality. One can’t possess the truth, one can possess images–one can’t possess the present, but one can have the past.” Susan Sontag.
- “A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the most profound sense and is thereby a true expression of what one thinks about life in its entirety.” Ansel Adams.
- “The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.” Susan Sontag.
- “What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.” Roland Barthes.
- “I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. My pictures show me how much I’ve lost.” Nan Goldin.
- “A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you.” Brigitte Bardot.
- “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” Dorothea Lange.
- I love this quote by Elliott Erwitt,” The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.”
- “A picture is worth a thousand words!” Minato Namikaze.
- “Above all, life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference.” Robert Frank.
- “For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.” Diane Arbus.
- “Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.” Joe McNally.
- “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 how you see them.” Elliott Erwitt.
- “Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.” David Alan Harvey.
- “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.
- “My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.” Richard Avedon.
- “Sometimes one waits too long for the perfect moment before snapping the picture. You never realized that you needed to change your perspective.” Miguel Syjuco.
- “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.
- “There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.” Robert Frank.
- “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.
- “A good photograph communicates a fact, touches the heart, and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective.” Irving Pen.
- “You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at an image for a second and think of it all your life.” Joan Miro.
- “This is so true. Some pictures look beautiful, and you might enjoy looking at them for some time, but you forget them very quickly, while compelling images stick in your head for the rest of your life even if you have seen them only once.” Andy Warhol
- “The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when its people do.” Andy Warhol.
- “When I say I want to photograph someone, it means that I’d like to know them. Anyone, I know I photograph.” Annie Leibovitz.
- “It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.” Alfred Eisenstaedt.
- “Great photography is about the depth of feeling, not the depth of field.” Peter Adams.
- “Only photograph what you love.” Tim Walker.
- “Work very hard until you don’t have to introduce yourself anymore.” Roberto Vazquez.
- “If Photoshop is the answer, you’re asking the wrong question,” Dean Farrell.
- “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.
- “When words become unclear, I shall focus on photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.” Ansel Adams.
- “Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.” Imogen Cunningham
- “Photography helps people to see.” Berenice Abbott.
- “I wish that all of nature’s magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed.” Annie Leibovitz.
- “Wherever there is light, one can photograph.” Alfred Stieglitz.
- “If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more exciting stuff.” Jim Richardson.
- “My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.” Steve McCurry.
- “Photography has no rules; it is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it is achieved.” Bill Brandt.
- “Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.” Marc Riboud.
- “The pictures are there, and you just take them.” Robert Capa.
- “The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?” Edward Weston
- “In photography, there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.” August Sander.
- “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.
- “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 in pain or discomfort, they trust you to ensure the images will act as their advocate.” Giles Duley.
- “I think good dreaming is what leads to good photographs.” Wayne Miller.
- “Photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future.” Sally Mann
- “A camera is a SAVE button for the mind’s eye.” Roger Kingston.
- “We don’t learn from our good images; we know from the ones that can be improved.” Jen Rozenbaum.
- “The best camera is the one you have with you”, Chase Jarvis.
- “A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the most profound sense, about what is being photographed.” Ansel Adams.
- “The camera is much more than a recording apparatus; it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.” Orson Welles.
- “Be yourself. I prefer seeing something; even if it is clumsy, it doesn’t look like somebody else’s work.” William Klein.
- “A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs so that one may reach maturity.” George Bernard Shaw.
- “You cannot possibly hit the shutter without leaving a piece of you in the image.” Joe Buissink.
- “Photography is an immediate reaction; drawing is a meditation.” Henri Cartier-Bresson.
- “Fear is the thing that prohibits a lot of photographers from reaching their full potential.” Collin Pierson.
- “As a powerful medium of expression and communications, photography offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation, and execution.” Ansel Adams.
- “I like to photograph anyone before they know what their best angles are.” Ellen von Unwerth.
There were 200 quotes about photographers from the world-famous photographer. These quests will help you to become a successful photographer if you read the whole article.