Photography Quotes

It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera... they are made with the eye, heart and head.

A window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person.

I am forever chasing light. Light turns the ordinary into the magical.

Only photography has been able to divide human life into a series of moments, each of them has the value of a complete existence.

You only get one sunrise and one sunset a day, and you only get so many days on the planet. A good photographer does the math and doesn't waste either.

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.

I like to make people a little uncomfortable. It encourages them to examine who they are and why they think the way they do.

I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

A lot of people seem to think that art or photography is about the way things look, or the surface of things. That's not what it's about for me. It's really about relationships and feelings...it's really hard for me to do commercial work because people kind of want me to do a Nan Goldin. They don't understand that it's not about a style or a look or a setup. It's about emotional obsession and empathy.

The biggest cliche in Photography is Sunrise and Sunset.

[Photography] ties back into this feeling of wanting to watch things fall and the moment before they break. Fireworks are that way for me - this lovely thing that blows up and is gone. It all goes back to this desire to record things before they disappear - the original reason we take pictures, right?

Wherever there is light, one can photograph.

Color in a picture is like enthusiasm in life.

The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.

Most of my photos are grounded in people, I look for the unguarded moment, the essential soul peeking out, experience etched on a persons face.

Surrealism is destructive,
but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.

Nothing is ever the same twice because everything is always gone forever, and yet each moment has infinite photographic possibilities.

The body says what words cannot.

Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask 'how', while others of a more curious nature will ask 'why'. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life.

If you want to be a photographer, first leave home

I don't have a burning desire to go out and document anything. It just happens when it happens. It's not a conscious effort, nor is it a struggle. Wouldn't do it if it was. The idea of the suffering artist has never appealed to me. Being here is suffering enough.

If photographers are responsible for creating or reflecting an image of women in society, then I must say, there is only one way for the future, and this is to define women as strong and independent. This should be the responsibility of photographers today: to free women, and finally everyone, from the terror of youth and perfection.

The desire to discover, the desire to move, to capture the flavor, three concepts that describe the art of photography.

Photography allows you to learn to look and see. You begin to see things you'd never paid attention to.

What I like best about underwater photography is giving a visual voice to the invisible. What I like least is the prospect of drowning.

One eye of the photographer looks wide open through the viewfinder, the other, the closed looks into his own soul.

If I knew how to take a good photograph, I'd do it every time.

Often people ask what I'm photographing, which is a hard question to answer. And the best what I've come up with is I just say: Life today.

My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.

Just as typography is human speech translated into what can be read, so photography is the translation of reality into a readable image.

My images are unashamedly idyllic and romantic, a kind of enchanted Africa. They're my elegy to a world that is steadily, tragically vanishing.

You can observe a lot by just watching.

I don't deliberately look for something dark or bleak or disconnected, in fact that's not something I'm even conscious of in the work as I'm making it. I'm always trying to create beauty, reveal hope, show the sense of longing that exists in isolation and loneliness, and capture the search for something greater inside all of my subjects.

Yes, photography saved my life. Every time I go through something scary, traumatic, I survive by taking pictures.

Art can no longer be merely a mirror, it must act as the organizer of the people's consciousness... No form of representation is so readily comprehensible to the masses as photography.

My pictures must first be beautiful, but that beauty is not enough. I strive to convey an underlying edge of anxiety, of isolation, of fear.

I think I’ve said this before many times—that photography allows you to learn to look and see. You begin to see things you had never paid any attention to. And as you photograph, one of the benefits is that the world becomes a much richer, juicier, visual place. Sometimes it is almost unbearable — it is too interesting. And it isn’t always just the photos you take that matters. It is looking at the world and seeing things that you never photograph that could be photographs if you had the energy to keep taking pictures every second of your life.

Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.

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

The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don't have to explain things with words.

The observer must learn to look at the picture as a graphic representation of a mood and not as a representation of objects.

A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free.

Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I'm going to take tomorrow.

Typography can be as exciting as illustration and photography.

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.

When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can.

If it makes you laugh, if it makes you cry, if it rips out your heart, that's a good picture.

Life wanted faces that would express what we wanted to tell. Not just the unusual or striking face, but the face that would speak out the message from the printed page. I am always looking for some typical person or face that will tie the picture essay together in a human way.