Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Photography.
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
I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else. Excitement about the subject is the voltage which pushes me over the mountain of drudgery necessary to produce the final photograph.
Berenice Abbott
Blessed be the inventor of photography! It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything else that has cast up in my time -- this art by which even the poor can possess themselves of tolerable of their absent dear ones.
Jane Welsh Carlyle, in The Colle
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.
Henri CartierBresson
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.
Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure.
Tony Benn
It is not merely the likeness which is precious... but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing... the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever! It is the very sanctification of portraits I think -- and it is not at all monstrous in me to say that I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest Artist's work ever produced.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The most refined skills of color printing, the intricate techniques of wide-angle photography, provide us pictures of trivia bigger and more real than life. We forget that we see trivia and notice only that the reproduction is so good. Man fulfils his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image, c
Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth?
Paul Gauguin
Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
Norman Mailer
When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.
Ansel Adams
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
Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
The camera can photograph thought. It's better than a paragraph of sweet polemic.
Dirk Bogarde
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
Dorothea Lange
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
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
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 Pierce
What the human eye observes causally and incuriously, the eye of the camera notes with relentless fidelity.
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
