We all became photographers in a different way. Everybody has his own story how this happened. Photography quotes can help us to know more about our passion and rediscover photography with a different approach.
Here is a collection of inspiring photography quotes from famous photographers, artists and other celebrities around the world. Some will inspire you or simply make you smile while others will sound like genuine tips to improve your ability and creativity while shooting. If you’re a beginner photographer some of the following photography quotes might offer a push and encouragement to learn, practice and grow as a photographer.
Enjoy these photography quotes and if you know more that aren’t listed here please send them.
“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”
― Ansel Adams
“The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.”
— Andy Warhol
“Photography helps people to see.”
― Berenice Abbott
“Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.”
― Dorothea Lange
“Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.”
― Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.”
— Diane Arbus
“In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.”
― August Sander
“Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography.”
― George Eastman
“Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.”
― Ansel Adams
“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
“Black and white are the colors of photography. To me they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected.”
― Robert Frank
“To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.”
― Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Above all, life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference”
― Robert Frank
“Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer – and often the supreme disappointment.”
― Ansel Adams
“I wish more people felt that photography was an adventure the same as life itself and felt that their individual feelings were worth expressing. To me, that makes photography more exciting.”
― Harry Callahan
“Computer photography won’t be photography as we know it. I think photography will always be chemical.”
― Annie Leibovitz
“Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.”
― Berenice Abbott
“Contrast is what makes photography interesting.”
― Conrad Hall
“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
“When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!”
― Ted Grant
“In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv.”
― Henri Cartier-Bresson
“The eye should learn to listen before it looks.”
― Robert Frank
“There are no bad pictures; that’s just how your face looks sometimes.”
― Abraham Lincoln
“Photograph is a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.”
― Ambrose Bierce
“I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.”
― Mahatma Gandhi
“There is a great difference between shooting a photograph and making a photograph.”
― Robert Heinecken
“Photography. The best cure for a bad memory.”
― John E. Bukowski
“Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.”
― Duane Michals
“I’m not a religious person. The language of photography is symbolic.”
― Sebastião Salgado
“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
“A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.”
― Diane Arbus
“Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.”
― Marc Riboud
“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”
― Dorothea Lange
“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”
― Susan Sontag
“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”
― Ansel Adams
“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.”
― Henri Cartier-Bresson
“The Earth is Art, The Photographer is only a Witness.”
― Yann Arthus-Bertrand
“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.”
― Joan Miró
“The world just does not fit conveniently into the format of a 35mm camera.”
― William Eugene Smith
“Photography is love affair with life.”
― Burk Uzzle
“Photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world.”
― Bruno Barbey
“A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.”
― George Bernard Shaw
“Always seeing something, never seeing nothing, being photographer.”
― Walter De Mulder
“Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.”
― Alfred Stieglitz
“When people ask what equipment I use, I tell them my eyes.”
― Ansel Adams
“It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.”
― Alfred Eisenstaedt
“Photographing a culture in the here and now often means photographing the intersection of the present with the past.”
― David DuChemin
“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
“The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.”
― Elliott Erwitt
“Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.”
― Joe McNally
“The more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.”
― Robert Mapplethorpe
“To collect photographers is to collect the world.”
― Susan Sontag
“A camera is a SAVE button for the mind’s eye.”
— Roger Kingston
“If your pictures are not good enough you are not close enough.”
— Robert Capa
“Allow yourself the freedom to step away from perfection because it is only then that you can find success.”
— Chase Jarvis
“Always remember to make room to shoot what you love. It’s the only way to keep your heart beating as a photographer.”
― Joe McNally