Photography Quotes

The camera has an interest in turning history into spectacle, but none in reversing the process. At best, the picture leaves a vague blur in the observer's mind; strong enough to send him into battle perhaps, but not to have him understand why he is going.

Denis Donoghue

In my mind's eye, I visualize how a particular . . . sight and feeling will appear on a print. If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice.

Ansel Adams

There are no bad pictures; that's just how your face looks sometimes.

Abraham Lincoln

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, In Face (London),

No matter how slow the film, Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer It has chosen.

Minor White

If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life. I mean people are going to say, You're crazy. Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.

Diane Arbus

Photographers never have much incentive to show the world as it is.

William Leith

The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

Walter Benjamin

Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man.

Edward Steichen

Any one who knows what the worth of family affection is among the lower classes, and who has seen the array of little portraits stuck over a laborer's fireplace will perhaps feel with me that in counteracting the tendencies, social and industrial, which every day are sapping the healthier family affections, the sixpenny photograph is doing more for the poor than all the philanthropists in the world.

Macmillan Magazine

Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter.

Ansel Adams

I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term-meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching-there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.

Ansel Adams

Too many photographers try too hard. They try to lift photography into the realm of Art, because they have an inferiority complex about their Craft. You and I would see more interesting photography if they would stop worrying, and instead, apply horse-sense to the problem of recording the look and feel of their own era.

Jessie Tarbox Beals

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.

John Berger

At least the box is full of something useful. On his photo gracing a box of Raisin Bran

Avery Brooks

Photography helps people to see.

Berenice Abbott

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 can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.

Berenice Abbott

I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.

John Steinbeck

For half a century, photography has been the art form of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due? To the designer of the camera? To the finger on the button? To the law of averages?

Gore Vidal