“To take photographs is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge in the face of fleeing reality. … It is putting one’s head, one’s eyes and one’s heart on the same axis. … It is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one’s originality. It is a way of life.”
Cartier Bresson
“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
Susan Sontag
“For me the noise of time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.”
Roland Barthes
“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”
Ansel Adams
“For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.”
Cartier-Bresson
“To photograph is to hold one’s breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.”
Cartier-Bresson
“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” Cartier-Bresson
“When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not emerge, do not leave: they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.”
Roland Barthes
“Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.”
Cartier-Bresson
“What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.”
Karl Lagerfeld
“Everything that flickered could be made permanent. That was what drew him to photography, what made every painstaking step worth it: the permanence of the image. That was what fascinated him, the working against time…”
Katie Roiphe
“Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.”
Susan Sontag
“The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.”
Elliott Erwitt
“I don’t trust words. I trust pictures.”
Gilles Peress
“A truly good photograph tells a story. It should connect to the reader. That’s all there is to it really. Things like composition, focus, colour, lighting and subject matter are all in a sense just fashionable. But the photos that tell stories are timeless.”
Leslie Brown
“Sharpness is a bourgeois concept.”
Cartier-Bresson
“The camera basically is a license to explore.”
Jerry Uelsmann
“The very secret of life for me, I believed, was to maintain in the midst of rushing events an inner tranquillity.”
Margaret Bourke-White
“Photography helps people to see.”
Berenice Abbott
“The cliché comes not in what you shoot but in how you shoot it.”
David duChemin
“Photography suits the temper of the age – of active bodies and minds. It is a perfect medium with one whose mind is teeming with ideas, imagery, for a prolific worker who would be slowed down by painting or sculpting, for one who sees quickly and acts decisively, accurately. “
Edward Weston
“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
“Does not the very word ‘creative’ mean to build, to initiate, to give out, to act – rather than to be acted upon, to be subjective? Living photography is positive in its approach, it sings a song of life – not death.”
Berenice Abbott
“I was born in Hoboken. I am an American. Photography is my passion. The search for Truth my obsession.”
Alfred Stieglitz
“I discovered photography completely by chance. My wife is an architect; when we were young and living in Paris, she bought a camera to take pictures of buildings. For the first time, I looked through a lens – and photography immediately started to invade my life.”
Sebastiao Salgado
“What it all boils down to for me is having the enthusiasm to do something for enjoyment and being stimulated by what’s around you. That’s what photography does for me.”
Graeme Le Saux
“Photography to me is catching a moment which is passing, and which is true.”
Jacques-Henri Lartigue
“Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.”
Andre Bazin
“You don’t take a photograph, you make it. “
Ansel Adams
“If your photos aren’t good enough, then you’re not close enough.“
Robert Capa
“Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.”
Imogen Cunningham
“In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality. “
Alfred Stieglitz
“Skill in photography is acquired by practice and not by purchase. “
Percy W. Harris
“Of course it’s all luck.”
Cartier-Bresson
“I am not interested in rules or conventions. Photography is not a sport.”
Bill Brandt
“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
“A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they’ll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won’t do a thing for you if you don’t have anything in your head or in your heart. “
Arnold Newman
“I never have taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse.“
Diane Arbus
“If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff.”
Jim Richardson
“It can be a trap of the photographer to think that his or her best pictures were the ones that were hardest to get.”
Timothy Allen
“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. “
Ralph Gibson
“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
“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting 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
“There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.“
Ansel Adams
“To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.”
Cartier-Bresson
“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
“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
“A photographer is an acrobat treading the high wire of chance, trying to capture shooting stars.”
Guy Le Querrec