Photographer Quotes

Wherever there is light, one can photograph.

A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you.

No one moment is most important. Any moment can be something.

Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.

Sometimes the little times you don't think are anything while they're happening turn out to be what marks a whole period of your life.

If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough.

Beauty and the devil are the same thing.

I didn't decide to be a photographer; I just happened to fall into it.

I don't have anything to say in any picture. My only interest in photography is to see what something looks like as a photograph. I have no preconceptions.

We photographers say that we take a picture, and in a certain sense, that is true. We take something from people's lives, but in doing so we tell their story.

Photographers have to impose order, bring structure to what they photograph. It is inevitable. A photograph without structure is like a sentence without grammar-it is incomprehensible, even inconceivable.

The still must tease with the promise of a story the viewer of it itches to be told.

When gifts are given to me through my camera, I accept them graciously.

I am at war with the obvious.

A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.

It’s not what you are that counts, it’s what they think you are.

Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest.

To make pictures big is to make them more powerful.

Don't shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.

A photographer who made a picture from a splendid moment, an accidental pose of someone or a beautiful scenery, is the finder of a treasure.

For me the printing process is part of the magic of photography. It's that magic that can be exciting, disappointing, rewarding and frustrating all in the same few moments in the darkroom.

When we do not know why the photographer has taken a picture and when we do not know why we are looking at it, all of a sudden we discover something that we start seeing. I like this confusion.

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.

The language that photography has is a formal language. Any photographer is doing something formal. If it's formal, then it must be an aesthetic way to communicate.

I like to photograph anyone before they know what their best angles are.

I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around, that nothing was more or less important.

I’ve noticed that the people who started on film still have the ability to see the person in front of them. Whereas for a lot of photographers who have only ever worked in digital, the relationship between the photographer and the person who they’re taking a picture of sort of doesn’t exist anymore. They’re looking at a computer screen as opposed to the person.

Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity.

I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.

One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.

You have to focus on what you are doing, not just as a photographer, but as a human being.

Photography is a love affair with life.

The Earth is Art, The Photographer is only a Witness.

I wanted to show the thing that had to be corrected: I wanted to show the things that had to be appreciated.

My best work is often almost unconscious and occurs ahead of my ability to understand it.

There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.

I'd very much like to create my own style as a photographer, even if it's just for myself.

I don't trust words. I trust pictures.

Everywhere I look and most of the time I look, I see photographs.

Photography is just light remembering itself.

There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph.

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.

A photographer's reality is what he or she wants to show.

Photographers can create moments that will never happen again but last a lifetime.

Take pictures of what you fear.

Above all, I know that life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference.

A camera exposes more than just an image. It also exposes the photographer.

If it doesn’t have ambiguity, don’t bother to take it. I love that, that aspect of photography - the mendacity of photography. It’s got to have some kind of peculiarity in it, or it’s not interesting to me.

Try to go out empty and let your images fill you up.

I'm not an artist. An artist makes an object. Me, it's not an object, I work in history, I'm a storyteller.