Best Photography Quotes

The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.

Because I know war… because I know the horror, I don’t want to add to it. After the war, we felt the need to celebrate life, and for me photography was the means to achieve this.

A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you.

There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.

There still is some opposition to it in some museums and art schools, but I think photography has really grown into a mature art form.

Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.

In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.

The camera makes you forget you’re there. It’s not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much.

A picture was a motionless record of motion. An arrested representation of life. A picture was the kiss of death pretending to possess immutability.

To make images is a way of ordering one’s world, of exploring and understanding one’s relationship to existence. … The images we make are often ahead of our understanding, but to say yes to a subject is also to have recognized, however dimly, a part of oneself; to live with that image, to accept its significance is perhaps to grow in understanding.

Tactility was rejected in conceptual photography. I embrace the possibilities of my medium. Surface, texture, and tactility is something analog photography can do well, or it is something I can do well in analog photography. It can be hard to know what or who is in control.

When you take a picture you haven’t a clue that it is going to be what it is. Maybe you have a clue but you don’t really know. There are too many possibilities. Part of the game is how many balls you can juggle. It is to me. When you are 12 you can juggle two. Maybe when you are 50 you can juggle five. That is an interesting concept to me: how much I can put in and still make it pull together?

I never felt in competition with anybody in war photography. You’re lucky to get your ass in and out again. It’s as simple as that. It’s the easiest photography in the world to shoot somebody who’s been shot up. It doesn’t take a genius. That’s easy. The only thing you need to know is your photography. Get in and if you’re lucky get out. And get as close as you can get.

Well, it was kind of an accident, because plastic is not what I meant to invent. I had just sold photograph paper to Eastman Kodak for 1 million dollars.

The denunciation of suffering by photography has replaced the religious justification of suffering in painting. Denunciation is a function of photojournalism, and in itself that’s a step in the right direction.

I hope to be a producer, a musician, a painter, a photographer – I’m going to push myself to do as many things as I can and see where it goes.

As for the various kinds of montage photography, they are in reality not photography at all but a kind of painting in which photography is used – as pastiches of textiles are used in crazy-quilts – to form a mosaic. Whatever value the montage may have derives from painting rather than the camera.

During photography’s first decades, exposure times were quite long… So, similar to the drawings produced with the help of a camera obscura, which depicted reality as static and immobile, early photographs represented the world as stable, eternal, unshakable.

I take more to the subject than to my ideas about it. I am not interested in any idea I have had, the subject is so demanding and so important.

I am trying to make some kind of connection to what is going on in the world, to make some sort of contact. And I use the instruments that our modern world offers, these extraordinary instruments of photography and film and computers.

I’ve been doing photography in one form or another for, oh golly, over seventy years. I don’t carry cameras. I used to. For many years I carried cameras wherever I went. Photograph whatever I saw that was of interest. In the last years, I’ve only used cameras to explore thematic ideas which presented themselves first. And then bring out the cameras to try to explore that idea.

It is important to understand what are you trying to capture with a camera. What you want to use this tool for. It helps to begin to search for and concentrate on thematic photography.

While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph.

… the reason we think that computer graphics technology has succeeded in faking reality is that we, over the course of the last hundred and fifty years, have come to accept the image of photography and film as reality.

I assumed from the outset that photography was already art, and that I and other people working in photography were artists. I understand now that this was a minority point of view.

I became enamored with photography when I was about 13 or 14 years old. I’ve been at it ever since. I studied seriously in the ’70s.

One advantage of photography is that it’s visual and can transcend language.

I just picked up a camera without any kind of ambition to be good or bad. And especially without any ambition to make a living… My whole freedom working in photography comes because I say to myself, Let’s see what is going on in this world. Let’s find out. How do these people look?

The departure of our boys to foreign parts with the ever-present possibility that they might never return, taught the real value of photography to every father and mother. To many a mother the photograph of her boy in his country’s uniform was the one never-failing consolation.

Photography is a generous medium.

Photography is about how you look and how you dream and how you see and what your interests are.

I found that the camera was a comforting companion. It opened up new worlds, and gave me access to people’s most intimate moments. I discovered the privilege of seeing life in all its complexity, the thrill of learning something new every day. When I was behind a camera, it was the only place in the world I wanted to be.

Anything that looks like an idea is probably just something that has accumulated, like dust. It looks like I have ideas because I do books that are all on the same subject. That is just because the pictures have piled up on that subject. Finally I realize that I am really interested in it. The pictures make me realize that I am interested in something.

Photography through the camera is an instrument of detection. We photograph not only what we know, but also what we don’t know.

Photography is like an open book to the world.