Abell, Sam

• It matters little how much equipment we use; it matters much that we be masters of all we do use.
• As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs.
• Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment - this very moment - to stay.

Adams, Ansel

• You don't take a photograph, you make it.
• There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.
• Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.
• A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.
• There are always two people in every image: the photographer and the viewer.
• A photograph is not an accident - it is a concept.
• The "machine-gun" approach to photography – by which many negatives are made with the hope that one will be good – is fatal to serious results.
• There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.
• Some photographers take reality... and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation.
• Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.

Allard, William Albert

• 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.

Bailey, David

• When I die I want to go to Vogue.
• I never cared for fashion much, amusing little seams and witty little pleats: it was the girls I liked.
• Everyone will take one great picture, I’ve done better because I’ve taken two.
• A positive attitude can really make dreams come true - it did for me.

Capa, Robert

• If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough.
• I hope to stay unemployed as a war photographer till the end of my life.
• War is like an aging actress: more and more dangerous and less and less photogenic.

Carroll, Lewis

• Photography is my one recreation and I think it should be done well.

Cartier-Bresson, Henri

• Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.
• Photography has not changed since its origin except in its technical aspects, which for me are not important.
• The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.
• There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.
• I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us.
• In a portrait, I'm looking for the silence in somebody.
• In photography, visual organization can stem only from a developed instinct.
• Sharpness is a bourgeois concept.
• Actually, 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.

Cunningham, Imogen

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

Dali, Salvador

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

Einstein, Albert

• Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einsenstaedt, Albert

• It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.

Erwitt, Elliott

• 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.
• Nothing happens when you sit at home. I always make it a point to carry a camera with me at all times. I just shoot at what interests me at that moment.

Friedlander, Lee

• I suspect it is for one’s self-interest that one looks at one’s surroundings and one’s self. This search is personally born and is indeed my reason and motive for making photographs.

Gandhi, Mohandas

• I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.

Geddes, Anne

• The hardest thing in photography is to create a simple image.

Gilden, Bruce

• 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.

Goddard, Robert

• One day, one second, I might close the shutter on the perfect photograph. There was always the chance, so long as there was film in the camera.

Haas, Ernst

• There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.

Hockney, David

• There is nothing wrong with photography, if you don't mind the perspective of a paralysed Cyclops.

Kertesz, Andre

• Seeing is not enough; you have to feel what you photograph.

Klein, William

• Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn’t look like somebody else’s work.

Lange, Dorothea

• Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.
• Where there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

Latique, Jacques-Henri

• I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost - that is important.

Lawrence, T E

• I had one craving all my life - for the power of self-expression in some imaginative form - but had been too diffuse ever to acquire a technique.

Leibovitz, Annie

• A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.
• 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.
• You don’t have to sort of enhance reality. There is nothing stranger than truth.
• If it makes you cry, it goes in the show.
• One doesn't stop seeing. One doesn't stop framing. It doesn't turn off and turn on. It's on all the time.
• All dancers are, by and large, a photographer's dream. They communicate with their bodies and they are trained to be completely responsive to a collaborative situation.
• 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.

Levitt, Helen

• Since I’m inarticulate, I express myself with images.

Mapplethorpe, Robert

• When I have sex with someone I forget who I am. For a minute I even forget I’m human. It’s the same thing when I’m behind a camera. I forget I exist.
• I never liked photography. Not for the sake of photography. I like the object. I like the photographs when you hold them in your hand.

Newton, Helmut

• My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.
• The first 10,000 shots are the worst.
• Some people's photography is an art. Not mine. Art is a dirty word in photography. All this fine art crap is killing it already.
• Any photographer who says he’s not a voyeur is either stupid or a liar.
• I always kept my equipment down to a minimum two cameras, each with three lenses, a flash that would clip onto the camera body, and one assistant. I did not want to spend time thinking about hardware; I wanted that time to concentrate on the girl and the world around her.
• Look, I'm not an intellectual - I just take pictures.

Parkinson, Norman

• The only thing that gets in the way of a really good photograph, is the camera.
• I like to make people look as good as they'd like to look, and with luck, a shade better.

Pasteur, Louis

• Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the prepared mind.

Picasso, Pablo

• In every photographer there was a painter, a true artist, awaiting expression.
• Two of the most frustrated trades are dentists and photographers - dentists because they want to be doctors, and photographers because they want to be painters.
• Now at least we know everything that painting isn't.

Ray, Man

• I paint when I cannot photograph.
• I still take three shots to do a portrait!

Rushdie, Salman

• A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.

Sontag, Susan

• The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
• A photograph is not an opinion. Or is it?
• The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

Salgado, Sebastiao

• I don’t want anyone to appreciate the light or the palette of tones. I want my pictures to inform, to provoke discussion – and to raise money.
• The picture is not made by the photographer, the picture is more good or less good in function of the relationship that you have with the people you photograph.
• Whenever possible, Salgado lives for a while with the people he photographs. “I tell a little bit of my life to them, and they tell a little of theirs to me. The picture itself is just the tip of the iceberg.
• I very much like to work on long-term projects...There is time for the photographer and the people in front of the camera to understand each other. There is time to go to a place and understand what is happening there. ...When you spend more time on a project, you learn to understand your subjects. There comes a time when it is not you who is taking the pictures. Something special happens between the photographer and the people he is photographing. He realizes that they are giving the pictures to him.
• I don't believe a person has a style. What people have is a way of photographing what is inside them. What is there comes out.
• You photograph with all your ideology.
• I try with my pictures to raise a question, to provoke a debate, so that we can discuss problems together and come up with solutions.

Steichen, Edward

• Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man.

Tunick, Spencer

• I’m in between an installation artist, video artist and photographer. And when you work with nude bodies, you’re immediately called a pornographer or a fashion photographer.

Waite, Charlie

• I often think of that rare fulfilling joy, when I am in the presence of some wonderful alignment of events. Where the light, the colour, the shapes and the balance all interlock so beautifully that I feel truly overwhelmed by the wonder of it.

Warhol, Andy

• Photographers feel guilty that all they do for a living is press a button.

Wilde, Oscar

• To look at a thing is very different from seeing it.
• Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
• The camera, you know, will never capture you. Photography, in my experience, has the miraculous power of transferring wine into water.

Winogrand, Garry

• Photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the photo as a judgment that the photograph is good.
• If I saw something in my viewfinder that looked familiar to me, I would do something to shake it up.

end faq