Buying a Nikon doesn’t make you a photographer. It makes you a Nikon owner.
—Unknown
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
—Diane Arbus (1923–71) American Photographer
If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.
—James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) American Painter, Etcher
Anonymous Senseless photographers practice random acts of beauty; intelligent photographers practice consistent acts of selflessness.
—Unknown
To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.
—Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French Photographer, Journalist
You don’t take a photograph, you make it.
—Ansel Adams (1902–84) American Photographer
A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.
—Eudora Welty (1909–2001) American Short Story Writer, Novelist
All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this—as in other ways—they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.
—John Berger (1926–2017) English Art Critic, Novelist
The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off.
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish Playwright
Sometimes I do get to places just when God’s ready to have somebody click the shutter.
—Ansel Adams (1902–84) American Photographer
the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads—as an anthology of images
—Rick Steves (b.1955) American Travel Writer, Entrepreneur, Activist
The term accessories has come to include a host of photographic gadgets of questionable value…
—Ansel Adams (1902–84) American Photographer
A good photograph is knowing where to stand
—Ansel Adams (1902–84) American Photographer
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 (1895–1965) American Documentary Photographer
Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
—Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American Writer, Philosopher
As I progressed further with my project, it became obvious that it was really unimportant where I chose to photograph. The particular place simply provided an excuse to produce work… you can only see what you are ready to see – what mirrors your mind at that particular time
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) American Philosopher
Memory is very important, the memory of each photo taken, flowing at the same speed as the event. During the work, you have to be sure that you haven’t left any holes, that you’ve captured everything, because afterwards it will be too late.
—Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French Photographer, Journalist
We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-born British Philosopher
If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) French Poet, Art Critic, Essayist, Translator
To the complaint, ‘There are no people in these photographs,’ I respond, ‘There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.
—Ansel Adams (1902–84) American Photographer
A good picture is equivalent to a good deed.
—Vincent van Gogh (1853–90) Dutch Painter
The negative is the equivalent of the composer’s score, and the print the performance.
—Ansel Adams (1902–84) American Photographer
To take photographs is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge in the face of fleeing reality. It is at that moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.
—Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French Photographer, Journalist
Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.
—Ansel Adams (1902–84) American Photographer
These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on old dry plates of sixty years ago… I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. Any they in turn seem to be aware of me
—Ansel Adams (1902–84) American Photographer
A photograph is usually looked at—seldom looked into.
—Ansel Adams (1902–84) American Photographer
It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.
—Vincent van Gogh (1853–90) Dutch Painter
Photograph is a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. It is a little better than the work of an Apache, but not quite so good as that of a Cheyenne.
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1913) American Short-story Writer, Journalist
Actually, I’m not all that interested in the subject of photography. Once the picture is in the box, I’m not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren’t cooks.
—Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French Photographer, Journalist
For me, photographs take their power from memory and emotion. A picture tells its own story, shaped by the mood or insights of the person you are at the time you see it. It becomes layered with the past and the present. It need not be of people you k
—Unknown