photographer quotes

We look at the world and see what we have learned to believe is there. We have been conditioned to expect.... but, as photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs.

The photographer projects himself into everything he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to know it and to feel it better.

It therefore should be possible for even the photographer - just as for the creative poet or painter - to use the object as a stepping stone to a realm of meaning completely beyond itself.

I have to be as much diplomat as a photographer.

Most times, we look at objects for their utilitarian purpose. But as photographers, we regard them for their momentary visual appearance.

Light meters read; photographers interpret.

Ansel Adams in 1930 had been training to become a concert pianist while considering a career as a photographer. He decided, after seeing the photographs by Paul Strand, that "the camera, not the piano, would shape [his] destiny." His mother and aunt both pleaded, "Do not give up the piano! The camera cannot express the human soul!" To which Adams replied, "The camera cannot, but the photographer can."

You only get one sunrise and one sunset a day, and you only get so many days on the planet. A good photographer does the math and doesn't waste either.

Jo Spence, Photographer: Available for divorces, funerals, illness, social injustice, scenes of domestic violence, exploration of sexuality and any joyful events.

The difference bewteen the recorder photographer... and the artist photographer... is that the artist will, by experience and learning... force the camera to paint the imagination...the emotion... the concept and the intent... rather than faithfully and truthfully reproduce an unnatractive and unflattering record.

The photographer was thought to be an acute but non-interfering observer – a scribe, not a poet. But as people quickly discovered that nobody takes the same picture of the same thing, the supposition that cameras furnish an impersonal, objective image yielded to the fact that photographs are evidence not only of what’s there but of what an individual sees, not just a record but an evaluation of the world. It became clear that there was not just a simple activity called seeing (recorded by, aided by cameras) but ‘photographic seeing’, which was both a new way for people to see and a new activity for them to perform.

As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

Some of the young photographers today enter photography where I leave off. My “grandchildren” astound me. What I worked for they seem to be born with. So I wonder where Their affirmations of Spirit will lead. My wish for them is that their unfolding proceeds to fullness of Spirit, however astonishing or anguished their lives.

To chart a course, one must have a direction. In reality, the eye is no better than the philosophy behind it. The photographer creates, evolves a better, a more selective, more acute seeing eye by looking ever more sharply at what is going on in the world.

I am not interested in showing my work to photographers any more, but to people outside the photo-clique. My pictures are not escapes from reality, but a contemplation of reality, so that I can experience life in a deeper way.

The uninvolved photojournalist’s pictures will at the very best serve to prop up the copy, at worst ruin it; the involved photographer’s work however will speak entirely for itself and will in no way profit by copy, though copy neatly added will not spoil such a picture; simply, it will not be read.

How aware were photographers in the past of other visual arts? “No photographer of any distinction at all could approach his work without some awareness of what was going on in other visual media, and for that matter neither the painter nor the draughtsman could ignore photography. […]"

A photographer is a witness. He has a moral duty. Every picture must be true and honest. I believe a photographer’s strength is his ability to accurately record reality. There are photographers who think they are lucky if they find unusual or special subject. But it is never the subject that is so marvelous. It is how alive and real the photographer can make it.

What is a good photograph? I cannot say. A photograph is tied to the time, what is good today may be a cliché tomorrow. The problem of the photographer is to discover his own language, a visual ABC. The picture represents the feelings and point of view of the intelligence behind the camera. This disease of our age is boredom and a good photographer must combat it. The way to do this is by invention – by surprise. When I say a good picture has surprise value I mean that it stimulates my thinking and intrigues me. The best way to achieve surprise quality is by avoiding clichés. Imitation is the greatest danger of the young photographer.

The personality and style of a photographer usually limits the type of subject with which he deals best. For example Cartier-Bresson is very interested in people and in travel; these things plus his precise feeling for geometrical relationships determine the type of pictures he takes best. What is of value is that a particular photographer sees the subject differently. A good picture must be a completely individual expression which intrigues the viewer and forces him to think.

The creative life of the commercial photographer is like the life of a butterfly. Very seldom do we see a photographer who is really productive for more than eight or ten years.

Laymen learn to read photographs the way they do headlines, skipping over them quickly to get the gist of what is being said. Photographers, on the other hand, study them with the care and attention to detail one might give to a difficult scientific paper or a complicated poem.

Logicians tell us that two Negatives make an Affirmative. Will somebody say how many Negatives make a Photographer ?

I like to look at pictures, all kinds. And all those things you absorb come out subconsciously one way or another. You'll be taking photographs and suddenly know that you have resources from having looked at a lot of them before. There is no way you can avoid this. But this kind of subconscious influence is good, and it certainly can work for one. In fact, the more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.

The unconscious obsession that we photographers have is that wherever we go we want to find the theme that we carry inside ourselves.

...the only things that distinguish the photographer from everybody else are his pictures: they alone are the basis for our special interest in him. If pictures cannot be understood without knowing details of the artist's private life, then that is a reason for faulting them; major art, by definition, can stand independent of its maker.

Anyone can shoot chaos. But the most perceptive photographers can make compelling pictures out of uninteresting moments.

Photography is a means to share the beauty & sometimes tragedy that surround us.

Some of my favorite memories are of people I have photographed.

Photographers are lousy editors.

A photographer is like a fish, he lays thousands of eggs hoping that one will grow to maturity

Notebook. No photographer should be without one!

As a fledgling street photographer strolling up and down the streets of cities, I quickly became aware of Time and its erosive power. My early photographs focused almost exclusively on the signs of an older culture that was holding on for dear life. I'd photograph seltzer bottles in old wooden crates piled high in a truck, or the dusty windows of Jewish bread shops, or old men building February fires on the beaches of Coney Island. My interest was more than documentary, for it seemed to me that what was about to vanish was important and irreplaceable, and frankly, I wanted my photographs to offer, in some manner, the power of resuscitation. Actually, I still do, though I no longer believe that photographs can prevent the homely past from being plowed under; rather, I believe that photographs - especially good photographs that compel our interest - help us to remember; and even more importantly, they help us to decide what is worth remembering.

The progress of a photographer can often be marked by the accumulated number of mistake he or she had made along the way.

I used to call myself a war photographer. Now I consider myself as an antiwar photographer.

Having and camera makes you no more a photographer than having a hammer and some nails makes you a carpenter.

There can't be two identical photographs in this world. Not even if it is from the same photographer.

The photographer should suffer, not the audience.

I want to be known for the images I make rather then the words I write, otherwise I'd be a writer not a photographer.

To us, the difference between the photographer as an individual eye and the photographer as an objective recorder seems fundamental, the difference often regarded, mistakenly, as separating photography as art from photography as document. But both are logical extensions of what photography means: note-taking on, potentially, everything in the world, from every possible angle.

Available to all photographers free is the one light source given by a window which faces the north. It's a painterly light that any face or still life comes alive in.

Different levels of photography require different levels of understanding and skill. A “press the button, let George do the rest” photographer needs little or no technical knowledge of photography. A zone system photographer takes more responsibility. He visualizes before he presses the button, and afterwards calibrates for predictable print values.

I enjoy traveling and recording far-away places and people with my camera. But I also find it wonderfully rewarding to see what I can discover outside my own window. You only need to study the scene with the eyes of a photographer.

I profoundly believe that a photographer worthy of the name is first and foremost a human being, a person deeply concerned with the human predicament. Such a person will want to make his photography do a job of work for the particular cause he has espoused. To my mind it is this dedication which gives the photographer the moral right to stand in front of other humans with a camera in his hand. I consider any alternative an unwarranted imposition upon the rights and privacy of the subject.

What some highbrows call rapport is nothing more than a mild flirtation between photographer and the girl on the other side of the camera. Some models get so professional they can send hours flirting with the camera itself while the poor photographer is reduced to the role of spectator.

The photographer sees the world as a child sees the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope. If he has a camera with which he can secure these ever-changing combinations, he is then able to look on them again and again, and he has the further pleasure of pleasing others with the sight of things which he, with perhaps unusual opportunities, was able to see, which his friends would otherwise not ever be able to.

Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.

When the novice photographer starts taking pictures, he carries his camera about and shoots everything that interests him. There comes a time when he must crystallize his ideas and set off in an particular direction. He must learn that shooting for the sake of shooting is dull and unprofitable.

The photographer, if he is to maintain his integrity must be responsible to himself, he must seek a public which will accept his vision, rather than pervert his vision to fit that public. Unfortunately many fine photographers never find this public and are virtually unemployable in the commercial field.

One of the leading uses of photography by the mass media came to be called photojournalism. From the late ‘twenties’ to the early ‘fifties’ what might have been the golden age of this speciality – photographers worked largely as the possessors of special and arcane skills, like the ancient priests who practiced and monopolized the skills of pictography or carving or manuscript illumination. In those halcyon days the photographer enjoyed a privileged status.

Photographers learn to interpret photographs in that technical way because they want to understand and use that ‘language’ themselves (just as musicians learn a more technical musical language than the layman needs). Social scientists who want to work with visual materials will have to learn to approach them in this more studious and time-consuming way.

I realize more and more what it takes to be a really good photographer. You go in over your head, not just up to your neck.

A photographer is nothing without his camera.

Why do most great pictures look uncontrived? Why do photographers bother with the deception, especially since it so often requires the hardest work of all? The answer is, I think, that the deception is necessary if the goal of art is to be reached: only pictures that look as if they had been easily made can convincingly suggest that beauty is commonplace.

It can be a trap of the photographer to think that his or her best pictures were the ones that were hardest to get.

What I look for in pictures I take: eyes, hands, head tilt, body language, background and use of space.

Photography is a calling that requires vigilance and alertness for that moment in time that only occurs once.

A photographer can sit at the edge of paradise and may only see unframeable beauty. A child with their parents camera will run through paradise capturing all that they see as they see it, filled with the untangled imagination of youth.