The Picture Can Never Be Whole Again

132 Inspirational Quotes for Photographers in 2022

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But I wonder, what else practise "they" say? In order to find out, I've culled together the best photography quotes on the subjects of photographs, cameras, inspiration, and more, as said past some of history's most famous and talented photographers.

These photography quotes offer insights into the minds of photography greats, from how they see the world and approach the art of making a photo, to their views on cameras, to ideas on how to improve 1's photography skills.

I promise these photography quotes inspire yous in your journey of condign a better photographer.

Photography Quotes

1. "If your photos aren't good plenty, then you lot're not close enough."
   — Robert Capa
2. "When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images get inadequate, I shall be content with silence."
   — Ansel Adams
3. "In photography there is a reality so subtle that information technology becomes more real than reality."
   — Alfred Stieglitz
4. "There is i matter the photograph must incorporate, the humanity of the moment."
   — Robert Frank
5. "Taking an image, freezing a moment, reveals how rich reality truly is."
   — Bearding
6. "Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever… Information technology remembers piddling things, long afterwards you have forgotten everything."
   — Aaron Siskind
7. "When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear."
   — Alfred Eisenstaedt

   

   Photograph by Jennifer Trovato

8. "We are making photographs to sympathise what our lives mean to u.s.."
   — Ralph Hattersley
9. "A thing that you come across in my pictures is that I was non afraid to fall in beloved with these people."
   — Annie Leibovitz
10. "I'm non all that interested in the subject of photography. One time the picture show is in the box, I'm not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, afterwards all, aren't cooks."
    — Henri Cartier-Bresson
11. "You lot don't take a photo. Yous ask quietly to infringe it."
    — Unknown
12. "Photography for me is not looking, it's feeling. If y'all tin't feel what you're looking at, and then y'all're never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures."
    — Don McCullin
13. "If it excites me, there is a proficient chance it will brand a skillful photograph."
    — Ansel Adams
14. "A portrait is non made in the camera but on either side of it."
    — Edward Steichen
15. "Information technology's one matter to make a pic of what a person looks like, it'due south some other thing to brand a portrait of who they are."
    — Paul Caponigro
16. "The best affair about a movie is that information technology never changes, even when the people in it practise."
    — Andy Warhol
17. "Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at dark and stealing Oreo cookies."
    — Diane Arbus
18. "What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are fourth dimension and light."
    — John Berger

    

19. "To me, photography is an fine art of observation. It'southward about finding something interesting in an ordinary identify… I've plant it has fiddling to exercise with the things you run across and everything to exercise with the mode you lot meet them."
    — Elliott Erwitt
20. "The picture that yous took with your camera is the imagination you want to create with reality."
    — Scott Lorenzo
21. "If the lensman is interested in the people in front of his lens, and if he is compassionate, it's already a lot. The instrument is non the camera only the photographer."
    — Eve Arnold
22. "A tear contains an ocean. A photographer is enlightened of the tiny moments in a persons life that reveal greater truths."
    — Anonymous
23. "The camera is an musical instrument that teaches people how to see without a photographic camera."
    — Dorothea Lange
24. "Substantially what photography is is life lit upward."
    — Sam Abell
25. "…we are there with our cameras to tape reality. Once nosotros commencement modifying that which exists, we are robbing photography of its virtually valuable attribute."
    — Philip Jones Griffiths
26. "I don't trust words. I trust pictures."
    — Gilles Peress
27. "It is my intention to present – through the medium of photography – intuitive observations of the natural earth which may have meaning to the spectators."
    — Ansel Adams
28. "I really believe in that location are things nobody would meet if I didn't photograph them."
    — Diane Arbus
29. "It's almost 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 take to care about what'due south around you and have a concern with humanity and the human one-act."
    — Elliott Erwitt
30. "Photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future."
    — Emerge Mann

    

31. "Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second."
    — Marc Riboud
32. "It'due south more important for a lensman to have very skilful shoes, than to take a very good camera."
    — Sebastiao Salgado
33. "Once y'all learn to intendance, you tin can record images with your mind or on film. In that location is no difference between the two."
    — Bearding
34. "Photograph: a moving picture painted past the sun without instruction in art."
    — Ambrose Bierce
35. "Every artist has a primal story to tell, and the difficulty, the impossible task, is trying to present that story in pictures."
    — Gregory Crewdson
36. "Photography is truth."
    — Jean-Luc Godard
37. "Photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the photograph as a judgment that the photo is proficient."
    — Garry Winogrand
38. "Photography tin can just represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past."
    — Berenice Abbott
39. "The pictures are at that place, and you simply take them."
    — Robert Capa
40. "Photography has nothing to do with cameras."
    — Lucas Gentry

    

41. "The photographic camera makes yous forget you're there. It's non like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much."
    — Annie Leibovitz
42. "If you see something that moves you, and so snap it, you keep a moment."
    — Linda McCartney
43. "In that location are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer."
    — Ansel Adams
44. "The more pictures y'all meet, the amend you are every bit a photographer."
    — Robert Mapplethorpe
45. "I am not interested in shooting new things – I am interested to come across things new."
    — Ernst Haas
46. "Photography to me is catching a moment which is passing, and which is true."
    — Jacques-Henri Lartigue
47. "Photography is the story I neglect to put into words."
    — Destin Sparks
48. "A photo is a secret most a secret. The more it tells you the less you lot know."
    — Diane Arbus
49. "A skilful snapshot keeps a moment from running away."
    — Eudora Welty
50. "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept."
    — Henri Cartier-Bresson
51. "If you are out there shooting, things will happen for you. If you're not out there, you lot'll only hear most it."
    — Jay Maisel
52. "It is an illusion that photos are made with the photographic camera… they are made with the centre, heart and head."
    — Henri Cartier-Bresson
53. "The whole point of taking pictures is and so that you don't accept to explicate things with words."
    — Elliott Erwitt
54. "It's not the lensman who makes the picture, but the person beingness photographed."
    — Sebastiao Salgado
55. "Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn't look like somebody else's piece of work."
    — William Klein
56. "To know ahead of time what you're looking for means y'all're then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting, and often false."
    — Dorothea Lange
57. "Ane doesn't terminate seeing. One doesn't end framing. It doesn't plough off and plough on. It'due south on all the time."
    — Annie Leibovitz
58. "Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life past holding it however."
    — Dorothea Lange

    

59. "What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that's gone forever, impossible to reproduce."
    — Karl Lagerfeld
60. "No place is tiresome, if you've had a skilful night'south slumber and have a pocket full of unexposed film."
    — Robert Adams
61. "A good photograph is i that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a inverse person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective."
    — Irving Penn
62. "There is simply you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we encounter is what we are."
    — Ernst Haas
63. "To consult the rules of composition before making a motion-picture show is a little similar consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk."
    — Edward Weston
64. "Wherever there is low-cal, i can photograph."
    — Alfred Stieglitz
65. "Since I'thousand inarticulate, I express myself with images."
    — Helen Levitt
66. "Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photo."
    — Matt Hardy
67. "Photography is pretty elementary stuff. Y'all just react to what you see, and take many, many pictures."
    — Elliott Erwitt
68. "You don't have a photograph, y'all brand it."
    — Ansel Adams
69. "With photography, I like to create a fiction out of reality. I try and practice this by taking society's natural prejudice and giving this a twist."
    — Martin Parr
70. "When people ask me what equipment I use – I tell them my eyes."
    — Anonymous
71. "Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make information technology really piece of work."
    — Martin Parr
72. "I wish that all of nature's magnificence, the emotion of the country, the living energy of identify could be photographed."
    — Annie Leibovitz
73. "I never have taken a picture I've intended. They're always ameliorate or worse."
    — Diane Arbus
74. "All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth."
    — Richard Avedon
75. "Today everything exists to end in a photo."
    — Susan Sontag
76. "I doubtable information technology is for one'southward self-involvement that one looks at ane's surroundings and one's cocky. This search is personally built-in and is indeed my reason and motive for making photographs."
    — Lee Friedlander
77. "The center should learn to listen before it looks."
    — Robert Frank
78. "Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put 4 edges effectually some facts, you change those facts."
    — Garry Winogrand
79. "You can await at a picture for a week and never recall of information technology once again. You can also look at the flick for a 2nd and think of it all your life."
    — Joan Miro

    

80. "Calorie-free makes photography. Encompass light. Admire it. Beloved it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you lot are worth, and yous volition know the key to photography."
    — George Eastman
81. "I think proficient dreaming is what leads to practiced photographs."
    — Wayne Miller
82. "Photography is a medium in which if you don't do information technology and then, very frequently you don't do it at all, because it doesn't happen twice."
    — Paul Strand
83. "The photo itself doesn't interest me. I want but to capture a minute office of reality."
    — Henri Cartier-Bresson
84. "I love the people I photograph. I hateful, they're my friends. I've never met well-nigh of them or I don't know them at all, yet through my images I live with them."
    — Bruce Gilden
85. "If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff."
    — Jim Richardson
86. "To photograph is to hold 1's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an prototype becomes a great physical and intellectual joy."
    — Henri Cartier-Bresson
87. "Ane should really use the photographic camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken bullheaded."
    — Dorothea Lange
88. "Photography helps people to see."
    — Berenice Abbott
89. "Taking pictures is savoring life intensely every hundredth of a second."
    — Marc Riboud
90. "When I say I desire to photo someone, what information technology really means is that I'd similar to know them. Anyone I know I photograph."
    — Annie Leibovitz
91. "A landscape image cuts across all political and national boundaries, it transcends the constraints of language and culture."
    — Charlie Waite
92. "My life is shaped past the urgent demand to wander and find, and my camera is my passport."
    — Steve McCurry
93. "At that place's a fourth dimension when people say your work is revolutionary, but you lot have to proceed being revolutionary. I can't keep shooting pop stars all my life. You have to continue irresolute, keep pushing yourself, looking for the new, the unusual."
    — Rankin
94. "Of course, there will always exist those who await simply at technique, who ask 'how', while others of a more curious nature will inquire 'why'. Personally, I have e'er preferred inspiration to information."
    — Human Ray
95. "Look and think before opening the shutter. The middle and mind are the truthful lens of the photographic camera."
    — Yousuf Karsh
96. "Don't pack up your photographic camera until you've left the location."
    — Joe McNally
97. "The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of information technology?"
    — Edward Weston
98. "The best images are the ones that retain their force and impact over the years, regardless of the number of times they are viewed."
    — Anne Geddes
99. "Photography is a small voice, at all-time, but sometimes one photograph, or a group of them, tin lure our sense of awareness."
    — W. Eugene Smith
100. "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
101. "The camera is an excuse to be someplace you lot otherwise don't belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation."
     — Susan Meiselas
102. "Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure."
     — Tony Benn
103. "Your beginning x,000 photographs are your worst."
     — Henri Cartier-Bresson

     

104. "Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the existent."
     — Ansel Adams
105. "It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter."
     — Alfred Eisenstaedt
106. "I like to photograph anyone earlier they know what their best angles are."
     — Ellen Von Unwerth
107. "Seeing is not enough; y'all have to feel what yous photograph."
     — Andre Kertesz
108. "The best camera is the i that's with you."
     — Chase Jarvis
109. "When you photograph people in color, y'all photograph their apparel. But when you photograph people in Black and white, y'all photograph their souls!"
     — Ted Grant
110. "Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field."
     — Peter Adams
111. "Life is similar a camera. Just focus on what'due south important and capture the good times, develop from the negatives and if things don't work out, just have another shot."
     — Unknown
112. "Only photograph what you lot beloved."
     — Tim Walker
113. "Twelve significant photographs in any one yr is a expert crop."
     — Ansel Adams
114. "Photographers terminate photographing subjects too soon before they have exhausted the possibilities."
     — Dorothea Lange
115. "A good photograph is knowing where to stand."
     — Ansel Adams
116. "If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug around a photographic camera."
     — Lewis Hine

     

117. "In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated."
     — August Sander
118. "Photography is a honey thing with life."
     — Burk Uzzle
119. "To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition in a fraction of a second of the significance of an event."
     — Henri Cartier-Bresson
120. "The painter constructs, the lensman discloses."
     — Susan Sontag
121. "When I photo, what I'1000 really doing is seeking answers to things."
     — Wynn Bullock
122. "Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness."
     — Yousuf Karsh
123. "It's weird that photographers spend years or even a whole lifetime, trying to capture moments that added together, don't fifty-fifty amount to a couple of hours."
     — James Lalropui Keivom
124. "If I have whatever 'message' worth giving to a beginner it is that there are no shortcuts in photography."
     — Edward Weston
125. "A camera is a tool for learning how to encounter without a photographic camera."
     — Dorothea Lange
126. "My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain."
     — Helmut Newton
127. "I think that emotional content is an paradigm's most of import element, regardless of the photographic technique. Much of the work I see these days lacks the emotional bear on to draw a reaction from viewers, or remain in their hearts."
     — Anne Geddes
128. "The photographic camera is much more than than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which letters reach us from another world."
     — Orson Welles
129. "In one case photography enters your bloodstream, it is similar a affliction."
     — Bearding
130. "The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score and the print the performance."
     — Ansel Adams
131. "Which of my photographs is my favorite? The i I'm going to take tomorrow."
     — Imogen Cunningham
132. "At that place is a creative fraction of a second when yous are taking a flick. Your eye must encounter a limerick or an expression that life itself offers y'all, and y'all must know with intuition when to click the photographic camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once yous miss information technology, information technology is gone forever."
     — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Nosotros hope these photography quotes tin inspire you lot in your own life and piece of work. Did we miss any photography quotes that should be on this list? Feel free to get in affect to let us know, and we may add information technology in a hereafter update!

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About the author: Tammy Jean Lamoureux is a lensman, artist & gypsy based out of Brooklyn, NY and Boston, MA. You tin encounter more of her work on her website.

marchanaporder.blogspot.com

Source: https://petapixel.com/photography-quotes/

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