Photography is a blend of passion and precision, where many elements come into play. Photography Quotes can inspire photographers, fueling the passion they seek. These words act as sparks of motivation, encouraging you to pursue your craft.
However, inspiration alone isn’t enough, you must apply what you learn to truly grow as a photographer. And sometimes, a funny photography quote can lighten the mood and give your mind a refreshing break.
Inspirational Photography Quotes
1. Motivation & Passion
- “Whatever situations you’re in, you have to find a way to rock it.” – Mary Marantz
- “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.” – William Albert Allard
- “Fear is the thing that prohibits a lot of photographers from reaching their full potential.” – Collin Pierson
- “My photography is the result of being there at the right moment.” – Rene Burri
- “When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear.” – Alfred Eisenstaedt
- “Photography is my passion. Whenever I get time, I click.” – Shaheer Sheikh
- “You cannot possibly hit the shutter without leaving a piece of you in the image.” – Joe Buissink
- “The more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
- “I think life is too short not to be doing something which you really believe in.” – Steve McCurry
- “I threw myself into this art form because photography had given me a new sense of mission and identity.” – Bob Anderson
- “You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again.” – Joan Miro
2. Technique & Creativity
- “Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.” – David Alan Harvey
- “If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff.” – Jim Richardson
- “Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.” – Berenice Abbott
- “There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph.” – Robert Heinecken
- “Skill in photography is acquired by practice and not by purchase.” – Percy W. Harris
- “Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.” – Steven Pinker
- “Only photograph what you love.” – Tim Walker
- “What makes a photograph a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.” – John Berger
- “Photography is a way of putting distance between myself and the work which sometimes helps me to see more clearly what it is that I have made.” – Andy Goldsworthy
- “Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame.” – Garry Winogrand
- “It’s about reacting to what you see, hopefully without preconception.” – Elliott Erwitt
- “Contrast is what makes photography interesting.” – Conrad Hall
- “I think good dreaming is what leads to good photographs.” – Wayne Miller
- “Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.” – Imogen Cunningham
- “Photography has nothing to do with cameras.” – Lucas Gentry
- “Essentially what photography is life lit up.” – Sam Abell
- “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” – Dorothea Lange
- “Photography gives you the opportunity to use your sensibility and everything you are to say something about and be part of the world around you.” – Peter Lindbergh
- “To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk.” – Edward Weston
- “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
- “A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.” – Eudora Welty
- “Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
- “Photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future.” – Sally Mann
- “A camera is a SAVE button for the mind’s eye.” – Roger Kingston
- “With creating, we are literally bringing something into existence that didn’t exist before.” – Montana Dennis
- “All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.” – Richard Avedon
- “I believe photographers should shoot what they want, not shoot what they get.” – Roberto Valenzuela
- “The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?” – Edward Weston
- “The camera makes you forget you’re there.” – Annie Leibovitz
- “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” – Robert Capa
- “Part of the role of photography is to exaggerate.” – Martin Parr
- “In photography, there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.” – August Sander
- “The best images are the ones that retain their strength and impact over the years, regardless of the number of times they are viewed.” – Anne Geddes
- “Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.” – Joe McNally
- “The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.” – Orson Welles
- “The more you photograph, the more you realize what can and what can’t be photographed. You just have to keep doing it” – Eliot Porter
- “I think of photography like therapy.” – Harry Gruyaert
- “Photography has no rules, it is not a sport.” – Bill Brandt
3. Emotion & Storytelling
- “Photography is about capturing souls not smiles.” – Dragan Tapshanov
- “Photography is the story I fail to put into words.” – Destin Sparks
- “I like to photograph anyone before they know what their best angles are.” – Ellen Von Unwerth
- “The eye should learn to listen before it looks.” – Robert Frank
- “A photograph is memory in the raw.” – Carrie Latet
- “Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving.” – Aaron Siskind
- “A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart, and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective.” – Irving Penn
- “Photography is a small voice, at best, but sometimes one photograph, or a group of them, can lure our sense of awareness.” – W. Eugene Smith
- “Photography is truth.” – Jean-Luc Godard
- “I think that emotional content is an image’s most important element, regardless of the photographic technique.” – Anne Geddes
- “Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling.” – Don McCullin
- “A photograph is like a recipe memory the finished dish.” – Carrie Latet
- “It’s one thing to make a picture of what a person looks like, it’s another thing to make a portrait of who they are.” – Paul Caponigro
- “Photography to me is catching a moment which is passing, and which is true.” – Jacques-Henri Lartigue
- “If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera.” – Lewis Hine
4. Life & Perspective
- “Perception isn’t reality, it’s the only reality.” – Amy and Jordan Demos
- “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.” – Bruce Gilden
- “No place is boring if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and a pocket full of unexposed film.” – Robert Adams
- “The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don’t belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation.” – Susan Meiselas
- “Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.” – Yousuf Karsh
- “Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.” – Matt Hardy
- “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.” – Ansel Adams
- “Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.” – Yousuf Karsh
- “The subject matter is so much more important than the photographer.” – Gordon Parks
- “To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
- “My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.” – Steve McCurry
- “I walk, I look, I see, I stop, I photograph.” – Leon Levinstein
- “A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.” – Edward Steichen
- “Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.” – Paul Strand
5. Responsibility & Perception
- “Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” – Susan Sontag
- “When I photograph, what I’m really doing is seeking answers to things.” – Wynn Bullock
- “If you see something that moves you, and then snap it, you keep a moment.” – Linda McCartney
- “It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer.” – David Bailey
- “I didn’t choose photography, photography chose me.” – Gerardo Suter
- “My interest in photography is not to capture an image I see or even have in my mind, but to explore the potential of moments I can only begin to imagine.” – Lois Greenfield
- “We are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us.” – Ralph Hattersley
- “There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.” – Robert Frank
- “I began to realize that the camera sees the world differently than the human eye and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed.” – Galen Rowell
- “Photography is the recording of strangeness and beauty with beguiling precision.” – Sebastian Smee
- “I’ve always believed that photography is a way to shape human perception.” – James Balog
- “For me, documentary photography has always come with great responsibility. Not just to tell the story honestly and with empathy, but also to make sure the right people hear it. When you photograph somebody who is in pain or discomfort, they trust you to make sure the images will act as their advocate.” – Giles Duley
- “Spend more time working on posing, expressions, and creating energy between the couple and you – they need to feel the energy that makes them react. Remember, reaction is part of the pose.” – Roberto Valenzuela
6. Capturing Moments & Observation
- “What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.” – Karl Lagerfeld
- “Photography is like a moment, an instant. You need a half-second to get the photo. So it’s good to capture people when they are themselves.” – Patrick Demarchelier
- “In the world of photography, you get to share a captured moment with other people.” – James Wilson
Nature Photography Quotes
- “Photographing a culture in the here and now often means photographing the intersection of the present with the past.” – David DuChemin
- “I am not interested in shooting new things – I am interested to see things new.” – Ernst Haas
- “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
Funny Photography Quotes
- “Clients love pictures where they’re laughing versus just smiling. That’s because there’s emotion behind it. Because you’re capturing energy, not just a still image.” – Jen Rozenbaum
- “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
- “Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work.” – Martin Parr
- “Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.” – Diane Arbus
Black and White Photography Quotes
- “Black and white are the colors of photography.” – Robert Frank
- “There’s something strange and powerful about black-and-white imagery.” – Stefan Kanfer
- “Everything always looked better in black and white.” – Jack Lowden
- “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
Photography Quotes for Instagram
- “Photography is the story I fail to put into words.” – Destin Sparks
- “Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.” – David Alan Harvey
- “A photograph is memory in the raw.” – Carrie Latet
- “The picture that you took with your camera is the imagination you want to create with reality.” – Scott Lorenzo
- “Photography is the beauty of life captured.” – Tara Chisolm
- “Photography is a love affair with life.” – Burk Uzzle
- “There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.” – Ansel Adams
- “Your first 1,000 photographs are your worst.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
- “The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.” – Andy Warhol
- “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” – Ansel Adams
- “Photography helps people to see.” – Berenice Abbott
- “Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.” – Marc Riboud
- “Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.” – Peter Adams
- “I don’t trust words. I trust pictures.” – Gilles Peress
- “It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.” – Alfred Eisenstaedt
End Words
A picture is worth a thousand words, but the right photography quotes can inspire you to capture moments with true meaning. These quotes, whether about color or black-and-white photography, offer timeless guidance for every photographer. Keep them close to your heart and let them fuel your creativity with every shot you take.