Photography is a matter of passion and perfection where several matters come in front. The quotes about photography are some words that give a boost to photographers in the passion they seek. The words work as burning inspiration that encourages you to walk your way.
However, this is not the only thing that can give you success. You need to follow the quotes in order to build yourself eligible for the job. Also, photography quotes funny themes that may make you laugh out loud sometimes to pamper your mind.
What Do Photography Quotes Signify?
Photography Quotes are some sentences conveyed by renowned photographers worldwide. Professional photographers use their experiences and great thinking to create those valuable sentences. There are various types of quotes such as inspirational, professional, famous, thought-provoking, photographers’ favourite, funny, and more. You need to understand the inner feeling while reading them otherwise they may seem just words.
Insight Quotes for Photographers
Bringing forth some insight quotes for you if photography is a passionate profession for you. Nevertheless, the quotes are evergreen cause photographers from different disciplines created them as the essence of their work experiences. In the variety of the words, nature photography quotes are quite a few where photographers are specialized to bring the best with their cameras.
1. “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
2. “When a moment in front of me appears to be particularly special, whether it be by beauty or experience, I capture it. I usually find a reason to justify taking that photo – symmetry, or color, or contrast – and it’s my hope that my photography sheds light onto what I see and do on a daily basis.”
– Connor Franta
3. “Whatever situations you’re in, you have to find a way to rock it.”
– Mary Marantz
4. “Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.”
– David Alan Harvey
5. “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.”
– Diane Arbus
6. “Perception isn’t reality, it’s the only reality.”
– Amy and Jordan Demos
7. “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
8. “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
9. “Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation, and execution.”
– Ansel Adams
10. “Fear is the thing that prohibits a lot of photographers from reaching their full potential.” Are you afraid of diving in? Or are you afraid because you don’t have time to do everything? These tips might help!
– Collin Pierson
11. “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
12. “When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I’d like to know them. Anyone I know I photographs.”
– Annie Leibovitz
13. “No place is boring if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and a pocket full of unexposed film.”
– Robert Adams
14. “Clients love pictures where they’re laughing versus just smiling. That’s because there’s the emotion behind it. Because you’re capturing energy, not just a still image.”
– Jen Rozenbaum
15. “A photograph is a memory in the raw.”
– Carrie Latet
16. “Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever… It remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.”
– Aaron Siskind
17. “I threw myself into this artform because photography had given me a new sense of mission and identity.”
– Bob Anderson
18. “The eye should learn to listen before it looks.”
– Robert Frank
20. “If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff.”
– Jim Richardson
21. “Photography is about capturing souls, not smiles.”
– Dragan Tapshanov
22. “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, the reaction is part of the pose.” Want to see what he means? Click here!
– Roberto Valenzuela
23. “I like to photograph anyone before they know what their best angles are.”
– Ellen Von Unwerth
24. “Photography is the story I fail to put into words.”
– Destin Sparks
25. “It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.”
– Paul Strand
26. “The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.”
– Steven Pinker
27. “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
28. “Only photograph what you love.”
– Tim Walker
29. “What makes a photograph a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.”
– John Berger
30. “Photography is a love affair with life.”
– Burk Uzzle
31. “My photography is the result of being there at the right moment.”
– Rene Burri
32. “The picture that you took with your camera is the imagination you want to create with reality.”
– Scott Lorenzo
33. “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
34. “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
35. “There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph.”
– Robert Heinecken
36. “Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.”
– Berenice Abbott
37. “Photography is truth.”
– Jean-Luc Godard
38. “Photography is the beauty of life captured.”
– Tara Chisolm
39. “Photographing a culture in the here and now often means photographing the intersection of the present with the past.”
– David DuChemin
40. “I am not interested in shooting new things – I am interested to see things new.”
– Ernst Haas
41. “The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.”
– Elliott Erwitt
42. “I feel more like a creative artist using photography because there’s – the digital work is so interesting now. It’s come to that. I have had many different stages of photography – there are many different ways to take photos. But I feel now I’m in that stage of my life where I use the camera, you know, in that way.”
– Annie Leibovitz
43. “Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lenses of the camera.”
– Yousuf Karsh
44. “Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.”
– Matt Hardy
45. “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”
– Ansel Adams
46. “I never have taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse.”
– Diane Arbus
47. “I think that emotional content is an image’s most important element, regardless of the photographic technique. Much of the work I see these days lacks the emotional impact to draw a reaction from viewers or remain in their hearts.”
– Anne Geddes
48. “When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”
– Robert Frank
49. “Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.”
– Yousuf Karsh
50. “The subject matter is so much more important than the photographer.”
– Gordon Parks
51. “To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.”
– Henri Cartier-Bresson
52. “My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.”
– Steve McCurry
53. “I walk, I look, I see, I stop, I photograph.”
– Leon Levinstein
54. “Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.”
– Steven Pinker
55. “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
56. “Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.”
– Paul Strand
57. “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
58. “Why do we use flash at all? Because photography is not the same as eyesight. We can see in low-light situations where cameras, dependent upon a physical process to record visual information, are half-blind.”
– David Hewson
59. “A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.”
– Edward Steichen
60. “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
61. “Photography has nothing to do with cameras.”
– Lucas Gentry
62. “Essentially what photography is life lit up.”
– Sam Abell
63. “Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work.” Do you find yourself struggling to make wedding photography work? Try some of these tips!
– Martin Parr
64. “You cannot possibly hit the shutter without leaving a piece of you in the image.”
– Joe Buissink
65. “Photography is my passion. Whenever I get time, I click.”
– Shaheer Sheikh
66. “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”
– Dorothea Lange
67. “I love this life. I feel like I am always catching my breath and saying, ‘Oh! Will you look at that?’ Photography has been my way of bearing witness to the joy I find in seeing the extraordinary in ordinary life. You don’t look for pictures. Your pictures are looking for you.”
– Harold Feinstein
68. “Skill in photography is acquired by practice and not by purchase.”
– Percy W. Harris
69. “One doesn’t stop seeing. One doesn’t stop framing. It doesn’t turn off and on. It’s on all the time.”
– Annie Leibovitz
70. “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. In this way, you might discover who you are, and with a little luck, you might discover something much larger than yourself.”
– Peter Lindbergh
71. “When you photograph a face… you photograph the soul behind it.”
– Jean-Luc Godard
72. “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.” Are you struggling with lighting? These tips might help!
– George Eastman
73. “In photography, there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.”
– Alfred Stieglitz
74. “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
75. “A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.”
– Eudora Welty
76. “Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.”
– Henri Cartier-Bresson
77. “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
78. “Photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future.”
– Sally Mann
79. “Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”
– Susan Sontag
80. “With creating, we are literally bringing something into existence that didn’t exist before.”
– Montana Dennis
81. “A camera is a SAVE button for the mind’s eye.”
– Roger Kingston
82. “Of course I realize that photography is not the technical facility as much as it is the eye, and this decision that one makes for the moment at which you are going to snap, you know.”
– Ben Shahn
83. “Kodak sells film, but they don’t advertise film; they advertise memories.”
– Theodore Levitt
84. “When I photograph, what I’m really doing is seeking answers to things.”
– Wynn Bullock
85. “We don’t learn from our good images; we learn from the ones that can be improved on.”
– Jen Rozenbaum
86. “If you see something that moves you, and then snap it, you keep a moment.”
– Linda McCartney
87. “There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.”
– Ansel Adams
88. “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
89. “I didn’t choose photography, photography chose me.”
– Gerardo Suter
90. “Which of my photographs is my favourite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.”
– Imogen Cunningham
91. “There’s a time when people say your work is revolutionary, but you have to keep being revolutionary. I can’t keep shooting pop stars all my life. You have to keep changing, keep pushing yourself, looking for the new, the unusual.”
– Rankin
92. “Photography is not about cameras, gadgets, and gizmos. Photography is about photographers. A camera didn’t make a great picture any more than a typewriter wrote a great novel.”
– Peter Adams
93. “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
94. “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.”
– Elliott Erwitt
95. “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
96. “The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.”
– Orson Welles
97. “Contrast is what makes photography interesting.”
– Conrad Hall
98. “It’s about 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 have to care about what’s around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy.”
– Elliott Erwitt
99. “Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.”
– Paul Strand
100. “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
101. “We are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us.”
– Ralph Hattersley
102. “The more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.”
– Robert Mapplethorpe
103. “There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.”
– Robert Frank
104. “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
105. “Photography is the recording of strangeness and beauty with beguiling precision.”
– Sebastian Smee
106. “I think life is too short not to be doing something which you really believe in.”
– Steve McCurry
107. “I think of photography like therapy.”
– Harry Gruyaert
108. “Photography has no rules, it is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it is achieved.”
– Bill Brandt
109. “The pictures are there, and you just take them.”
– Robert Capa
110. “The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?”
– Edward Weston
111. “The camera makes you forget you’re there. It’s not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much.”
– Annie Leibovitz
112. “Part of the role of photography is to exaggerate, and that is an aspect that I have to puncture. I do that by showing the world as I really find it.”
– Martin Parr
113. “A photograph is like a recipe memory the finished dish.”
– Carrie Latet
114. “In photography, there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.”
– August Sander
115. “The two most engaging powers of a photograph are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.”
– William Thackeray
116. “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
117. “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
118. “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 Miro
119. “While 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.”
– Dorothea Lange
120. “Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.”
– Joe McNally
121. “All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.”
– Richard Avedon
122. “I believe photographers should shoot what they want, not shoot what they get.”
– Roberto Valenzuela
123. “I’ve always believed that photography is a way to shape human perception.”
– James Balog
124. “I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.”
– Diane Arbus
125. “Photography to me is catching a moment which is passing, and which is true.”
– Jacques-Henri Lartigue
126. “I think good dreaming is what leads to good photographs.”
– Wayne Miller
127. “To me, the magic of photography, per se, is that you can capture an instant of a second that couldn’t exist before and couldn’t exist after. It’s almost like a cowboy that draws his gun. You draw a second before or after, you miss and you’re dead – not them. To me, photography’s always like that.”
– Mario Testin
128. “Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.”
– Garry Winogrand
129. “Results are uncertain even among the more experienced photographers.”
– Matthew Brady
130. “In the world of photography, you get to share a captured moment with other people.”
– James Wilson
131. “If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera.”
– Lewis Hine
132. “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
133. “There’s something strange and powerful about black-and-white imagery.”
– Stefan Kanfer
134. “Everything always looked better in black and white. Everything always looked as if it were the first time; there’s always more people in a black and white photograph. It just makes it seem that there were more people at a gig, more people at a football match, than with colour photography. Everything looks more exciting.”
– Jack Lowden
135. “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
136. “Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.”
– Dorothea Lange
137. “A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.”
– Annie Leibovitz
138. “Great photography is about the depth of feeling, not the depth of field.”
– Peter Adams
139. “I don’t trust words. I trust pictures.”
– Gilles Peress
140. “It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.”
– Alfred Eisenstaedt
141. “Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.”
– Diane Arbus
142. “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”
– Robert Capa
143. “Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.”
– Marc Riboud
144. “Your first 1,000 photographs are your worst.”
– Henri Cartier-Bresson
145. “The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.”
– Andy Warhol
146. “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”
– Ansel Adams
147. “There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.”
– Ansel Adams
148. “Photography helps people to see.”
– Berenice Abbott
149. “What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.”
– Karl Lagerfeld
150. “When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear.”
– Alfred Eisenstaedt
End Words
“A picture worth a thousand words” is a renowned speech. But, the words that influence photographers to capture moments with meaning are worth more. We have brought you some of the quotes that can make a good collection with greater meaning. There is no variation between quotes about black and white photography and color. They are meant for both. Keep them by heart and do your best with the shooting gears you have.
