photography quotes

When you buy a 1/4-inch drill bit, what you really need is a 1/4-inch hole. Clients don't need photographers, they need photographs.

Photography is truth. The cinema is truth 24 times per second.

To speak technically photography is the art of writing with light. But if I want to think about it more philosophically, I can say that photography is the art of writing with time. When you capture an image you capture not only a piece of space, you also capture a piece of time. So you have this piece of specific time in your square or rectangle. In that sense I find that photography has more to do with time than with light.

Just remember one of Farace Laws of photography: Sucess is hard, failure is easy.

Photography is to the layman perhaps the most enticing art. As a buff and a follower, at a respectful distance, I find myself like others, having the heart of a Steiglitz with hands that sometimes seem impeded by boxing gloves. What is exasperating is that one can feel closer to managing the skills of photography than most other arts, and yet be a long hop, skip and delusional way from it.

Photography is the beauty of life, captured.

Imagine a world without photography, one could only imagine.

Everywhere is something which could be beautiful. You must only to see and to know what and how to take off, to crop from the infinity. Abstract, fine art, nature, landscape and portrait photography.

Photography is one big scrapbook of your life.

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.

When photography was invented artists thought that it would bring ruin to art but it is shown that photography has been an ally of art, an educator of taste more powerful than a hundred academies of Design would have been…

The whole question of success and failure [in photography] resolves itself into an investigation of the capacities of the machine and well may we be satisfied with the rich gifts it bestows, without straining it into a competition with art. For everything for which art, so-called, has hitherto been the means but no the end, photography is the allotted agent – for all that requires mere manual correctness, and mere manual slavery, without any employment of the artistic feeling, she is the proper and therefore the perfect medium. She is made for the present age in which the desire for art resides in a small minority, but the craving, or rather necessity for cheap, prompt, and correct facts in the public at large. Photography is the purveyor of such knowledge to the world. She is sworn witness of everything presented to her view.

Photography is an adventure just as life is an adventure. If a man wishes to express himself photographically, he must understand, surely to a certain extent, his relationship to life. I am interested in relating the problems that affect me to some set of values that I am trying to discover and establish as being my life. I want to discover and establish them through photography.

The traditional difficulty of balancing the mechanical with the imaginative schools of photography still operates. In schools of photography meaningful art education is often lacking and on the strength of their technical ability alone students, deprived of a richer artistic training, are sent forth inculcated with the belief that they are creative photographers and artists. It is yet a fact that today, as in the past, the most inspiring and provocative works in photography come as much (and probably more) from those who are in the first place artists.

Has it led you to the conclusion that photography is an art ? Or it is simply a means of recording ? “I’m glad you asked that. I’ve been wanting to say this for years. Is cooking an art ? Is talking an art ? Is even painting an art ? It is artfulness that makes art, not the medium itself. Of course photography is an art – when it is in the hands of artists.”

Traditionally, photography has dealt with recording the world as it is found. Before photography appeared the fine artists of the time, the painters and sculptors, concerned themselves with rendering reality with as much likeness as their skill enabled. Photography, however, made artistic reality much more available, more quickly and on a much broader scale.

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.

What happens inside your mind can happen inside a camera!

Lifes light. Life is light. You can make light do anything you want to. Photography means 'light writing'.

Photography! Acquiring the knowledge and tools to express your artistic vision.

Photography, like alcohol, should only be allowed to those who can do without it.

Your mind is like a live camera that is constantly taking pictures of every single moment that comes onto you... So be a good photographer!

Professional Photography is all about your eyes, brain, and imagination. Now that's all 20%, and the business itself is 80%.

The intention of a photgrapher is to capture the beauty in places, obvious or hidden, in which modern age and technology cause us to dismiss.

The difference between Art and Shit is someone’s opinion.

If calling it art will sell [a photograph], good dealers will call it art. I actually had a client say that if someone was an artist making photographs she could buy what I was selling, but if he was a photographer making photographs she couldn't. So I said, Okay, he's an artist.

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

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

Photography is only intuition, a perpetual interrogation – everything except a stage set.

I didn't choose photography. Photography chose me.

Ethics are indeispensable to me. I need a framework to my life, with values I hold dear.
I like honesty in the broades sense: keeping one's word, acting responsible, being accountable... Simple principles, really pretty basic stuff, but crucial.

In the eigthies particulary, photography was a fairly easy profession, fairly exciting too in so far as getting published was no big deal, and you could earn money from it... Hence the risk of dubious behaviour.
Since I've been in this trade, I have tried my best to be honest, to be respectful of those I photograph and I remain true to those I work with. (For instance, I have stayed with the same two publishers for the last twenty five years.)
The trust we build over the years if of tremendous help to me when I start in a new project and need to find associates.

Photography is like making cheese. It takes a hell of a lot of milk to make a small amount of cheese just like it takes a hell of a lot of photos to get a good one.

I photograph continuously, often without a good idea or strong feelings. During this time the photos are nearly all poor, but I believe they develop my seeing and help later on in other photos. I do believe strongly in photography and hope by following it intuitively that when the photographs are looked at they will touch the spirit in people.

All photography is propaganda.

I genuinely believe photography to be at it's most potent when underscored by truth. To contrive is to control, and frankly I'm more interested in observation than direction. Riding the ebb and flow of Sydney's streets, approaching the next corner afresh, never quite knowing what may present itself in the adjoining street. That's the random beauty of street photography. Control has to be a stultifying, creative break. The magic, emotion charged moments are in my experience invariably captured us.

Photography is like an open book to the world.

I have a very good memory, but it's short. Thank god for photography.

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.

Like every other means of expression, photography, if it is to be utterly honest and direct, should be related to the life of the times – the pulse of today.

I wish more people felt that photography was an adventure the same as life itself and felt that their individual feelings are worth expressing. To me, that makes photography more exciting.

I believe that the chief value of photography as a means of communication depends entirely on the ability of the camera to arrest life instantly. It thrills me to speculate how the invention of photography has contributed to the speeding up of human reflexes. The rapidly working camera has sharpened man’s capacity to observe and observe rapidly; it has taught many of us to use our minds to classify visual phenomena in an instant of time; to relate our own attitude to that of the person in front of the camera in a split second. This to my mind is the essence of photojournalism.

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. […]"

Only recently serious research into the relationship between photography and art has taken place. Why has it been so long in coming ? “In some respects historical research is analogous with that of science. The bringing to light of factual material and the development of ideas is to a large extent cumulative.[…] But when artists themselves were, from about 1910, beginning to tear down the bastions protecting Art in its ivory tower, questioning the idea of Art with a capital ‘A’, photography was inevitably to assume a new stature both in the eyes of artists and the public, too."

To be able to see in concrete terms what was created in a fraction of a second is a rare luxury. Even though fixed in time, a photograph evokes as much feeling as that which comes from music or dance. Whatever the mode – from the snapshot to the decisive moment to multi-media montage – the intent and purpose of photography is to render in visual terms feelings and experiences that often elude the ability of words to describe. In any case, the eyes have it, and the imagination will always soar farther than was expected.

Photography must soon become in fact what it is destined to be: the world’s hobby and the world’s helper – universal in usefulness and pleasure-giving.

One very important difference between color and monochromatic photography is this: in black and white you suggest; in color you state. Much can be implied by suggestion, but statement demands certainty… absolute certainty.

Everything around us, ourselves included, is in constant change. Photography is our means of capturing now - and to remember where we've come from.

There is 3 key things for good photography: the camera,lighting and... photoshop

Digital photography is doing for photography what the piano did for keyboard music.

Photography. The best cure for a bad memory.

The locomotives are black. The coal is black. The tracks are black. The night is black. So what am I going to do with color?

Photography is all about light, composition and, most importantly, emotion.

The photograph contains and constrains within its own boundaries, excluding all else, a microcosmic analogue of the framing of space which is knowledge. As such it becomes a metaphor of power, having the ability to appropriate and decontextualize time and space and those who exist within it.

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.

For me, photography is a virtue, a charity if done to value the people around.