Art Photography Quotes

• Photography is a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing. The contest can be held anywhere.

  John Szarkowski

  Photography, Photographer, Contests

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• Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.

  Ansel Adams

  Photography, Art, Communication

  Ansel Adams (1962). “Basic Photo: Artificial-light photography”

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• A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.

  Diane Arbus

  Inspirational, Photography, Philosophical

  66 Copy quote

• It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  Photography, Photographer, Photography By Photographers

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• I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do - that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.

  Diane Arbus

  Photography, Naughty, Favorites Things

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• Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.

  Ansel Adams

  Photography, Powerful, Communication

  Ansel Adams, Edwin Herbert Land (1974). “Singular images”, Morgan & Morgan, Inc.

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• The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  Photography, Art, Creativity

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• What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.

  John Berger

  Inspirational, Photography, Light

  John Berger, Jean Mohr (2016). “Another Way of Telling: A Possible Theory of Photography”, p.75, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• You don't make a photograph just with a camera

  Ansel Adams

  Photography, Cameras, Photographer

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• Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.

  Man Ray

  Photography, Inspiration, Information

  "Photographers on Photography: A Critical Anthology". Book by Nathan Lyons, p. 80, 1966.

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• The camera cannot lie, but it can be an accessory to untruth.

  Harold Evans

  Photography, Lying, Cameras

  Harold Evans (1978). “Editing and Design: Pictures on a page”

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• The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.

  Edward Steichen

  Photography, Art, Ideas

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• Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.

  Andre Bazin

  Photography, Art, Doe

  André Bazin (2005). “What is Cinema?”, p.14, Univ of California Press

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• The visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable.

  Dorothea Lange

  Photography, Unattainable, Photographer

  Anne Whiston Spirn, Dorothea Lange (2009). “Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field”, University Of Chicago Press

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• One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.

  Dorothea Lange

  Photography, Cameras, Use

  Anne Whiston Spirn, Dorothea Lange (2009). “Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field”, University Of Chicago Press

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• You don't take a photograph, you make it.

  Ansel Adams

  Inspirational, Photography, Art

  33 Copy quote

• It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.

  David Bailey

  Photography, Art, Learning

  86 Copy quote

• Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I'm going to take tomorrow.

  Imogen Cunningham

  Inspirational, Photography, Art

  94 Copy quote

• Black and white are the colors of photography. To me they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected.

  Robert Frank

  Photography, Black And White, Color

  Sarah Greenough, Robert Frank, Philip Brookman, National Gallery of Art (U.S.) (1994). “Robert Frank”, Natl Gallery of Art

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• 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

  Inspirational, Inspiring, Photography

  "You Might Be a Cowgirl If . . .: A Guide to Life on the Range" by Jill Charlotte Stanford, Robin L. Corey, Globe Pequot, (p. 111), September 4, 2012.

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• Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

  Scott Adams

  Love, Inspirational, Life

  Scott Adams (2007). “Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!: Cartoonist Explains Cloning, Blouse Monsters, Voting Machines, Romance, Monkey G ods, How to Avoid Being Mistaken for a Rodent, and More”, p.438, Penguin

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  The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

  Dorothea Lange

  Inspirational, Photography, Creativity

  Dorothea Lange, Robert Coles (1982). “Photographs of a Lifetime”

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• Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

  Susan Sontag

  Inspirational, Photography, Today

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.25, Macmillan

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• What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.

  Karl Lagerfeld

  Inspirational, Photography, Art

  71 Copy quote

• There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.

  Ernst Haas

  Photography, Creativity, Light

  37 Copy quote