101 Photography Quotes

Photography is an art form that transcends words, capturing fleeting moments and eternal emotions in a single frame. Whether you're a seasoned professional or an aspiring photographer, finding inspiration can be crucial to honing your craft. That's why we've curated a collection of the top 101 photography quotes. These pearls of wisdom from celebrated photographers, philosophers, and artists will not only ignite your creative spark but also deepen your appreciation for the art of photography. So grab your camera, dive into these quotes, and let your imagination run wild.

1. “A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.” - Diane Arbus

2. “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.” - Henri Cartier-Bresson

3. “A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.” - Ansel Adams

4. “A recurrent question about photography is how much self expression it allows the photographer. There are two standard positions, each corresponding to a different location oh photographic skill. The opposition is neatly summed up in Bioy Casares’s novel The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata (1989). The hero Nicolasito Almanza declares: ‘I am convinced that all of photography depends on the moment we press the release […] I believe that you’re a photographer if you know exactly when to press the release.’ In making this declaration he is responding to the opinion expressed by Mr Gruter, owner of a photographic laboratory: ‘[…] sometimes I wonder if the true work of the photographer doesn’t begin in the dark room, amid the trays and the enlarger.” - Clive Scott

5. “A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth. ” - Richard Avedon

6. “Above all, life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference” - Robert Frank

7. “These are the two basic controls at the photographer's command--position and timing--all others are extensions, peripheral ones, compared to them” - David Hurn

8. “To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.” - Susan Sontag

9. “I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it. ” - Lorrie Moore

10. “To the complaint, 'There are no people in these photographs,' I respond, There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.” - Ansel Adams

11. “You don't take a photograph, you make it.” - Ansel Adams

12. “You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.” - Ansel Adams

13. “A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.” - Eudora Welty

14. “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.” - Ansel Adams

15. “He owned an expensive camera that required thought before you pressed the shutter, and I quickly became his favorite subject, round-faced, missing teeth, my thick bangs in need of a trim. They are still the pictures of myself I like best, for they convey that confidence of youth I no longer possess, especially in front of a camera.” - Jhumpa Lahiri

16. “As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible. ” - Susan Sontag

17. “A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you.” - Brigitte Bardot

18. “When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.” - Aleksandar Hemon

19. “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” - Dorothea Lange

20. “I nearly believe you. The challenge remains extended-make me believe you -- Benjamin” - Shermaine Williams

21. “What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: She is going to die: I shudder… over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.” - Roland Barthes

22. “Both those taking snaps and documentary photographers, however, have not understood 'information.' What they produce are camera memories, not information, and the better they do it, the more they prove the victory of the camera over the human being.” - Vilém Flusser

23. “What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.” - Karl Lagerfeld

24. “I don't just look at the thing itself or at the reality itself; I look around the edges for those little askew moments-kind of like what makes up our lives-those slightly awkward, lovely moments.” - Keith Carter

25. “A photograph of a woman crying tells me nothing about grief. Or a photograph of a woman ecstatic tells me nothing about ecstasy. What is the nature of these emotions? The problem with photography is that it only deals with appearances.” - Duane Michals

26. “Photography is essentially an act of recognition by street photographers, not an act of invention. Photographers might respond to an old man’s face, or an Arbus freak, or the way light hits a building—and then they move on. Whereas in all the other art forms, take William Blake, everything that came to that paper never existed before. It’s the idea of alchemy, of making something from nothing.” - Duane Michals

27. “Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.” - Joe McNally

28. “No matter how much crap you gotta plow through to stay alive as a photographer, no matter how many bad assignments, bad days, bad clients, snotty subjects, obnoxious handlers, wigged-out art directors, technical disasters, failures of the mind, body, and will, all the shouldas, couldas, and wouldas that befuddle our brains and creep into our dreams, always remember to make room to shoot what you love. It’s the only way to keep your heart beating as a photographer.” - Joe McNally

29. “Unpredictability. Accidents. Not good when you’re engaging in, say, brain surgery, but when lighting...wonderful!” - Joe McNally

30. “It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us.” - Henri Cartier-Bresson

31. “A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second. ” - Salman Rushdie

32. “Most of Arbus's work lies within the Warhol aesthetic, that is, defines itself in relation to the twin poles of boringness and freakishness; but it doesn't have the Warhol style. Arbus had neither Warhol's narcissism and genius for publicity nor the self-protective blandness with which he insulates himself from the freaky nor his sentimentality. It is unlikey that Warhol, who comes from a working-class family, ever felt any ambivalence toward success which afflicted the children of the Jewish upper middle classes in the 1960s. To someone raised as a Catholic, like Warhol (and virtually everyone in his gang), a fascination with evil comes much more genuinely than it does to someone from a Jewish background. Compared with Warhol, Arbus seems strikingly vulnerable, innocent--and certainly more pessimistic. Her Dantesque vision of the city (and the suburbs) has no reserves of irony. Although much of Arbus's material is the same as that depicted in, say, Warhol's Chelsea Girls (1966)...For Arbus, both freaks and Middle America were equally exotic: a boy marching in a pro-war parade and a Levittown housewife were as alien as a dwarf or a transvestite; lower-middle-class suburbia was as remote as Times Square, lunatic asylums, and gay bars. Arbus's work expressed her turn against what was public (as she experienced it), conventional, safe, reassuring--and boring--in favor of what was private, hidden, ugly, dangerous, and fascinating. These contrasts, now, seem almost quaint. What is safe no long monopolizes public imagery. The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally vacant are seen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.” - Susan Sontag

33. “Always seeing something, never seeing nothing, being photographer” - Walter De Mulder

34. “One of the risks of appearing in public is the likelihood of being photographed.” - Diane Arbus

35. “Art is what we call...the thing an artist does.It's not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human.Art is not in the ...eye of the beholder. It's in the soul of the artist.” - Seth Godin

36. “But I've always been a sucker for externals alone: the shape, the shine, what the surface suggests to my palm. So mechanically disinclined it's verging on criminal, I never understood the beauty of an object's workings until Linny sat my reluctant self down one day and showed me her camera. Within fifteen minutes, I had fallen hard for the whole gadgety, eyelike nature of the thing: a tiny piece of glass slowing, bending, organizing light - light - into your grandmother, the Grand Canyon, the begonia on the windowsill, the film keeping the image like a secret. Grandmother, canyon, begonia tucked neatly into the sleek black box, like bugs in a jar. My mind boggled.” - Marisa de los Santos

37. “It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world: they are glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures; or even like those pairs of fish (sharks, I think, according to Michelet) which navigate in convoy, as though united by an eternal coitus.” - Roland Barthes

38. “I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double. Heautoscopy was compared with an hallucinosis; for centuries this was a great mythic theme.” - Roland Barthes

39. “It is by studium that I am interested in so many photographs, whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them as good historical scenes: for it is culturally (this connotation is present in studium) that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions.” - Roland Barthes

40. “[Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this 'me' which like knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features 'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography.” - Roland Barthes

41. “We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the totemic theater, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Katha-Kali, the Japanese No mask ... Now it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph; however 'lifelike' we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.” - Roland Barthes

42. “Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths.” - Eddie Adams

43. “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 (i)emerge(i), do not (i)leave(i): they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.” - Roland Barthes

44. “The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.” - Roland Barthes

45. “The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent tings, but because on each occasion (i)it fills the sight by force(i), and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed (that we can sometimes call it mild does not contradict its violence: many say that sugar is mild, but to me sugar is violent, and I call it so).” - Roland Barthes

46. “For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life. Contemporary with the withdrawal of rites, Photography may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death. ” - Roland Barthes

47. “A paradox: the same century invented History and PHotography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically: the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, in short, of impatiences, of everything which denies ripening.” - Roland Barthes

48. “Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumes as such, publicly.” - Roland Barthes

49. “Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot — or will not — achieve the mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the professional: for it is he who stands closer to the (i)noeme(i) of Photography.” - Roland Barthes

50. “The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence ... The Photograph then becomes a bizarre (i)medium(i), a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest (o)shared(i) hallucination (on the one hand 'it is not there,' on the other 'but it has indeed been'): a mad image, chafed by reality.” - Roland Barthes

51. “One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-repertoire. Consider the United Sates, where everything is transformed into images: only images exist and are produced and are consumes ... Such a reversal necessarily raises the ethical question: not that the image is immoral, irreligious, or diabolic (as some have declared it, upon the advent of the Photograph), but because, when generalized, it completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under cover of illustrating it.” - Roland Barthes

52. “Pictures could not be accessories to the story -- evidence -- they had to contain the story within the frame; the best picture contained a whole war within one frame.” - Tatjana Soli

53. “When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!” - Ted Grant

54. “Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.” - Alfred Stieglitz

55. “To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.” - Henri Cartier-Bresson

56. “It's been said that the role of the artist is to teach us to see and that's true. However, the role of other artists is to teach me how they see. To learn how I see is somethig that cannot be taught but must be learned.” - Brooks Jensen

57. “The key is to integrate our art into our life, not the other way around.” - Brooks Jensen

58. “The eye should learn to listen before it looks.” - Robert Frank

59. “I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.” - Diane Arbus

60. “Photography is like stealing.You rob someone of a moment that exposes something essential about their character,their soul if you like.there are people who are very conscious of that,who find that terrifying.The thought that everyone,friend of foe,can get so close to you,look you straight in the eye and judge you without having any control over it or being able to respond.A part of them has become the property of the photographer.” - Esther Verhoef

61. “Through photography and image I have been afforded the privilege of sharing the stories and myths of people's lives with others. The process for me became self-revelatory. It was a process of soul-making, something all humans are engaged in, no matter their endeavor. I saw a part of myself in each person I photographed. I came to realize, through the alchemical process of living, that each life is important, no matter how little that life seems to offer.” - J. Don Cook

62. “I am not a photographer , I am a canon owner !!!” - Walaa Walkademagmal

63. “It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.” - Dorothea Lange

64. “What I'm trying to describe is that it's impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else's.... That somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own.” - Diane Arbus

65. “One thing that struck me early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.” - Diane Arbus

66. “You think too much and I bet it kills the magic," he says simply. "Some things are just instinct and if you try and replace that with thinking they die. You can read and think as much as you want before and after, but in the moment, man, you have to, like, let go.” - Blue GhostGhost

67. “A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is thereby a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.” - Ansel Adams

68. “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 Cartier-Bresson

69. “I imagine that the essential gesture of the Operator is to surprise something or someone (through the little hole in the camera), and that this gesture is therefore perfect when it is performed unbeknownst to the subject being photographed. From this gesture derive all photographs whose principle (or better whose alibi) is “shock”; for the photographic “shock” consists less in traumatizing than in revealing what was so well hidden that the actor himself was unaware or unconscious of it.” - Roland Barthes

70. “Photography is without mercy--though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.” - Nick Harkaway

71. “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

72. “I don't trust words. I trust pictures.” - Gilles Peress

73. “The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.” - Susan Sontag

74. “Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.” - Susan Sontag

75. “If only I had thought of a Kodak! I could have flashed that glimpse of the Under-world in a second, and examined it at leisure.” - H.G. Wells

76. “Giving Back reframes portraits of philanthropy.” - Valaida Fullwood

77. “That was why, later on, he began to lose interest in photography: first when colour took over, then when it became plain that the old magic of light-sensitive emulsions was waning, that to the rising generation the enchantment lay in a techne of images without substance, images that could flash through the ether without residing anywhere, that could be sucked into a machine and emerge from it doctored, untrue. He gave up recording the world in photographs then, and transferred his energies to saving the past.” - J.M. Coetzee

78. “We are often taught to look for the beauty in all things, so in finding it, the layman asks the philosopher while the philosopher asks the photographer.” - Criss Jami

79. “With flowers the sex is up-front and x-rated.” - Harold Davis

80. “I try about four or five looks during a shoot. A look can be defined by changes to hair, makeup, jewelry, props, furniture, background, partial clothing, fabric accents, accessories, lighting, etc.” - A.K. Nicholas

81. “Any files I give to the model are downsized (typically 800x1200 pixels)... By not giving out my high resolution files, they cannot be used without my knowledge.” - A.K. Nicholas

82. “The only thing they'll let you shoot with a camera.” - Jodi Picoult

83. “Those static images have the uncanny ability to jar the memory and bring places and people back to life. They bridge the present with the past and validate as real what the passage of time has turned into hazy recollections. Were it not for them, my experiences would have remained as just imperfect memories of perfect moments.” - Isabel Lopez

84. “Photography is an itch that wont go away. No matter how much you scratch it.” - Dara McGrath

85. “This prolific and inventive photographer (Edward Steichen) must be given credit for virtually inventing modern fashion photography, and as the tohousands of high-quality original prints in the Conde Nast archives prove, only Irving Penn and Richard Avedon have since emerged as serious historical rivals.” - William A. Ewing

86. “If the photographer isn't going to pay attention to the picture he is making, that if he thinks the camera is just a machine and not an avenue of expression, then he has no business asking anyone for anything, let alone their time and interest. Don't show the world, he said, invent the world.” - Whitney Otto

87. “Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.Photographs are.” - Susan Sontag

88. “That we are not totally transformed, that we can turn away, turn the page, switch the channel, does not impugn the ethical value of an assault by images. It is not a defect that we are not seared, that we do not suffer enough, when we see these images. Neither is the photograph supposed to repair our ignorance about the history and causes of the suffering it picks out and frames. Such images cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers. Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is there some state of affairs which we have accepted up to now that ought to be challenged? All this, with the understanding that moral indignation, like compassion, cannot dictate a course of action.” - Susan Sontag

89. “...if we consider the difference between William Henry Jackson packing in his cameras by mule, and the person stepping out of his car to take a picture with an Instamatic, it becomes clear how some of our space has vanished; if the time it takes to cross space is a way by which we define it, then to arrive at a view of space 'in no time' is to have denied its reality.” - Robert Adams

90. “The Indians say to draw someone's portrait is to steal their soul, i am taking photographs, does it mean that i am just borrowing them?” - T.A

91. “What can be proved by a photograph, can never be by a word.” - T.A

92. “One question that especially intrigues me is exactly when humpbacks started coming to Hawaii and why. In artwork and oral histories of ancient Hawaiians there is no record of humpback whales being there, and there is no evidence that humpbacks were there in large numbers in the mid-1800's during the heyday of whaling. The whalers who provisioned in Hawaii in the winter couldn't have overlooked the numbers of whales that are in Hawaii now. We really don't know what happened, but everything points to a recent colonization of humpbacks. (p.162).” - Charles "Flip" Nicklin

93. “Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever…it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.” - Aaron Siskind

94. “Among the things she said: "Women seem to possess all the natural gifts essential to a good portraitist ... such as personality, patience and intuition. The sitter ought to be the predominating factor in a successful portrait. Men portraitist are apt to forget this; they are inclined to lose the sitter in a maze of technique luxuriating in the cleverness and beauty of their own medium.” - Whitney Otto

95. “Later, Jenny would say she seldom knew what she would take a picture of when she picked up a camera, that she only knew once she peered through the viewfinder, as if the photograph had finally found her.” - Whitney Otto

96. “Anyone can take a picture of poverty; it’s easy to focus on the dirt and hurt of the poor. It’s much harder—and much more needful—to pry under that dirt and reveal the beauty and dignity of people that, but for their birth into a place and circumstance different from our own, are just like ourselves. I want my images to tell the story of those people and to move us beyond pity to justice and mercy.” - David duChemin

97. “Photographing a culture in the here and now often means photographing the intersection of the present with the past.” - David duChemin

98. “A representational photograph says, 'This is what Vienna looked like.' An interpretational photograph goes one better and says, 'This is what Vienna was like. This is how I felt about it.” - David duChemin

99. “It’s the difference between your wife’s passport photograph and the portraits you took when you gotengaged. Both may have been created with similar technology, but what stands in that great gulf between them are the passion you have for your wife, the knowledge you have of her personality, and your willingness to use your craft, time, and energy to express that. One says, “She looks like this.” The other says, “This is who she is to me. It’s how I feel about her. See how amazing she is?” - David duChemin

100. “Am I in the picture? Am I getting in or out of it? I could be a ghost, an animal or a dead body, not just this girl standing on the corner…?” - Francesca Woodman

101. “What was the barn like before it was photographed?' he said. 'What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can't answer these questions because we've read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura. We're here, we're now.” - Don DeLillo