Photography Quotes

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv.note: Leitmotiv is German for 'leading motif'. It is a short musical phrase of specific sound effect that signals the appearance of a person, action, or situation.

Henri CartierBresson

Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.

Berenice Abbott

A photograph never grows old. You and I change, people change all through the months and years, but a photograph always remains the same. How nice to look at a photograph of mother or father taken many years ago. You see them as you remember them. But as people live on, they change completely. That is why I think a photograph can be kind.

Albert Einstein

I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive. I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence.

Man Ray

The magic of photography is metaphysical. What you see in the photograph isn't what you saw at the time. The real skill of photography is organized visual lying.

Terence Donovan

That the outer man is a picture of the inner, and the face an expression and revelation of the whole character, is a presumption likely enough in itself, and therefore a safe one to go on; borne out as it is by the fact that people are always anxious to see anyone who has made himself famous. Photography offers the most complete satisfaction of our curiosity.

Arthur Schopenhauer

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

Susan Sontag

It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph -- only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.

Susan Sontag

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

Susan Sontag

The photographic image... is a message without a code.

Roland Barthes

Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.

Wallace Stevens