131 Inspiring Photography Quotes

Photography is a powerful medium that captures the essence of moments and weaves stories through the lens. Whether you're an aspiring photographer or simply someone who appreciates the artistry of a well-composed image, words can add another layer of inspiration to your journey. Delving into the world of photography quotes offers a glimpse into the minds of those who have mastered the craft and those who find profound meaning in it. In this collection, we've gathered 131 of the most inspiring photography quotes that celebrate the creativity, passion, and vision essential to the art of capturing the world around us. Let these words serve as a source of motivation, encouraging you to see the beauty in everyday scenes and to capture them with clarity and purpose.

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

2. “While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.” - Dorothea Lange

3. “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

4. “I know the best moments can never be captured on film, even as I spend nearly half my life trying to do just that.” - Rosie O'Donnell

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. “For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.” - Henri Cartier-Bresson

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. “What's really important is to simplify. The work of most photographers would be improved immensely if they could do one thing: get rid of the extraneous. If you strive for simplicity, you are more likely to reach the viewer. ” - William Albert Allard

17. “We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

18. “There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.” - Ansel Adams

19. “Photographers tend not to photograph what they can’t see, which is the very reason one should try to attempt it. Otherwise we’re going to go on forever just photographing more faces and more rooms and more places. Photography has to transcend description. It has to go beyond description to bring insight into the subject, or reveal the subject, not as it looks, but how does it feel?” - Duane Michals

20. “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

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

22. “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

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

24. “Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.” - Ansel Adams

25. “A photograph is usually looked at- seldom looked into.” - Ansel Adams

26. “Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment. ” - Ansel Adams

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

28. “It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the godly knowledge of how they turne dout after all - who they married, the date of their death - with no thought for who will one day be holding photographs of us.” - Ian McEwan

29. “Everything that flickered could be made permanent. That was what drew him to photography, what made every painstaking step worth it: the permanence of the image. That was what fascinated him, the working against time...” - Katie Roiphe

30. “There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” - Ansel Adams

31. “A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.” - George Bernard Shaw

32. “To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk.” - Edward Weston

33. “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

34. “The task of a philosophy of photography is to reflect upon this possibility of freedom - and thus its significance - in a world dominated by apparatuses; to reflect upon the way in which, despite everything, it is possible for human beings to give significance to their lives in the face of the chance necessity of death. Such a philosophy is necessary because it is the only form of revolution left open to us.” - Vilém Flusser

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.” - Susan Sontag

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

40. “Jay Maisel always says to bring your camera, ‘cause it’s tough to take a picture without it. Pursuant to the above aforementioned piece of the rule book, subset three, clause A, paragraph four would be…use the camera.Put it to your eye. You never know. There are lots of reasons, some of them even good, to just leave it on your shoulder or in your bag. Wrong lens. Wrong light. Aaahhh, it’s not that great, what am I gonna do with it anyway? I’ll have to put my coffee down. I’ll just delete it later, why bother? Lots of reasons not to take the dive into the eyepiece and once again try to sort out the world into an effective rectangle.It’s almost always worth it to take a look.” - Joe McNally

41. “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

42. “A professor I had in college used to tell me that if someone won’t listen to what you have to say because you’re not wearing a tie, then put on a tie, ’cause what you have to say is more important than not wearing a tie. He was right.” - Joe McNally

43. “You’ve gotta taste the light, like my friend and fellow shooter Chip Maury says. And when you see light like this, trust me, it’s like a strawberry sundae with sprinkles.” - Joe McNally

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

45. “When I was in school, I wanted to be W. Eugene Smith. He was a legendary staffer at Life, a consummate photojournalist, and an architect of the photo essay. He was also kinda crazy.That was obvious when he came to lecture at Syracuse University and put a glass of milk and a glass of vodka on the lectern. Both were gone at the end of the talk. He was taking questions and I was in the front row, hanging on every word.Mr. Smith, is the only good light available light?” came the question.He leaned into the microphone. “Yes,” he baritoned, and paused.A shudder ran through all of us. That was it! No more flash! God’s light or nothing!But then he leaned back into the mic, “By that, I mean, any &*%%@$ light that’s available.”Point taken.” - Joe McNally

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

47. “Guys don't understand great art. They don't care that sometimes the camera has power beyond the photographer to record emotion that only the heart can see. They're threatened when the camera jumps ahead of me. Todd Kovich was pissed when I brought my Nikon to the prom, but I'd missed too many transcendent shots over the years to ever take a chance of missing one again. A prom, I told him, had a boundless supply of photogenic bozos who could be counted on to do something base.” - Joan Bauer

48. “Perhaps the central question about [Eliot] Porter's work is about the relationship between science, aesthetics, and environmental politics. His brother, the painter and critic Fairfield Porter, wrote in a 1960 review of [Porter's] colour photographs: 'There is no subject and background, every corner is alive,' and this suggests what an ecological aesthetic might look like. ” - Rebecca Solnit

49. “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

50. “Photography is simultaneously and instantaneously the recognition of a fact and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that express and signify that fact” - Henri Cartier-Bresson

51. “Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” - Henri Cartier-Bresson

52. “In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday. Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen the gradual covering over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future of the city, governed and corrupted by those unknown children, where note even the ashes of his glory would remain.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

53. “Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell.” - Kim Edwards

54. “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

55. “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

56. “For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.” - Roland Barthes

57. “I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice (apology of this mortiferous power: certain Communards paid with their lives for their willingness or even their eagerness to pose on the barricades: defeated, they were recognized by Thiers's police and shot, almost every one).” - Roland Barthes

58. “[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

59. “In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The 'anything whatever' then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.” - Roland Barthes

60. “...The editors of (i)Life(i) rejected Kerész'a photographs when he arrived in the United States in 1937 because, they said, his images 'spoke too much'; they made us reflect, suggested a meaning — a different meaning from the literal one. Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is (i)pensive(i), when it thinks.” - Roland Barthes

61. “The (i)studium(i) is ultimately always coded, the (i)punctum is not)...” - Roland Barthes

62. “Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.” - Roland Barthes

63. “The Winter Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing (monster or treasure), but because it would tell me what constituted that thread which drew me toward Photography. I had understood that henceforth I must interrogate the evidence of Photography, not from the viewpoint of pleasure, but in relation to what we romantically call love and death.” - Roland Barthes

64. “For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ('this-has-been'), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.” - Roland Barthes

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “I am a professional photographer by trade and an amateur photographer by vocation.” - Elliot Erwitt

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

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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

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

80. “Remember that even just watching animals has an impact. Intrusion into their living space can expose them to predation, keep them from feeding or other essential activities, or cause them to leave their young exposed to predation or the elements. No photo or viewing opportunity is worth harassing or stressing wildlife. In appreciating and watching them, we have a responsibility to protect and preserve the animals that share our state.” - Mary Taylor Young

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

82. “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.” - Peter Gasser

83. “For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.” - Diane Arbus

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

87. “Another unary photograph is the pornographic photograph (I am not saying the erotic photograph: the erotic is a pornographic that has been disturbed, fissured). Nothing more homogeneous than a pornographic photograph. It is always a naive photograph, without intention and without calculation. Like a shop window which shows only one illuminated piece of jewelry, it is completely constituted by the presentation of only one thing: sex: no secondary, untimely object ever manages to half conceal, delay, or distract... A proof a contrario: Mapplethorpe shifts his close-ups of genitalia from the pornographic to the erotic by photographing the fabric of underwear at very close range: the photograph is no longer unary, since I am interested in the texture of the material. The presence (the dynamics) of this blind field is, I believe, what distinguishes the erotic photograph from the pornographic photograph. Pornography ordinarily represents the sexual organs, making them into a motionless object (a fetish), flattered like an idol that does not leave its niche; for me, there is no punctum in the pornographic image; at most it amuses me (and even then, boredom follows quickly). The erotic photograph, on the contrary (and this is its very condition), does not make the sexual organs into a central object; it may very well not show them at all; it takes the spectator outside its frame, and it is there that I animate this photograph and that it animates me.” - Roland Barthes

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

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

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

94. “Mediante la fotografía y la palabra escrita intento desesperadamente vencer la condición fugaz de mi existencia, atrapar los momentos antes de que se desvanezcan, despejar la confusión de mi pasado.” - Isabel Allende

95. “People spot a big black lens, and they worry about what they're doing, or how their hair looks. Nobody see the person holding the camera.” - Erica O'Rourke

96. “Pictures put you in front of a reality that most of the times you don't want to see, don't want to know about, don't want to get involved.” - Oliviero Toscani

97. “Photographs don’t discriminate between the living and the dead. In the fragments of time and shards of light that compose them, everyone is equal. Now you see us; now you don’t. It doesn’t matter whether you look through a camera lens and press the shutter. It doesn’t even matter whether you open your eyes or close them. The pictures are always there. And so are the people in them.” - Robert Goddard

98. “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

99. “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

100. “Sometimes one waits too long for the perfect moment before snapping the picture. You never realize that you needed was to change perspective.” - Miguel Syjuco

101. “The camera has always been a guide, and it's allowed me to see things and focus on things that maybe an average person wouldn't even notice.” - Don Chadwick

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

103. “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

104. “The only other white people we saw during the three days we stayed there were a German couple intent on taking pictures of their stuffed sheep in a variety of locations around the world.” - Tynan

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

106. “I looked at the images hanging on the walls, wanting to find those things in her pictures. My favorite was directly across from me: a photo of a beaten, weathered hull of a rowboat. I knew about as much about boats as I did photography, which was next to nothing, but that boat wasn’t going anywhere near the water anytime soon unless the owner decided it would make a mediocre shipwreck to explore while scuba diving. Nevertheless, it faced the out-of-focus lake in the background, almost hopefully, as if it hadn’t yet decided its best days were gone, as if it still dreamed of bobbing peacefully on the waves.“Does that one have a name?” I asked.She smiled. “Seaworthy.” - Leesa Freeman

107. “The very secret of life for me, I believed, was to maintain in the midst of rushing events an inner tranquility.” - Margaret Bourke-White

108. “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

109. “It's often about the simple things, isn't it? Painting and photography are first about seeing, they say. Writing is about observing. Technique is secondary. Sometimes the simple is the most difficult.” - Linda Olsson

110. “Zar mi Friedrich ne može reći jesu li moje fotografije umjetnost? Što je uopće umjetnost? Ostarjela sam, a da me nisu uputili u odrastanje. Nazivaju me umjetnicom, premda o umjetnosti ne znam ništa. Moje su fotografije lov trenutka u koji sam ulovljena i sama. Otimam se vremenu kao muha paučini i to nazivaju umjetnošću! Je li umjetnost bilježiti dubinu? Bilježiti? Nije li i ova riječ infinitiv...? Fotografirati, bilježiti, loviti, uhvatiti.” - Jasna Horvat

111. “Fotografi mengajarkan pada kita cara yang unik dalam melihat dunia dan sekaligus memberikan penyadaran baru akan segala keindahan yang ada di sekitar kita.” - Deniek G. Sukarya

112. “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

113. “A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.” - Annie Leibovitz

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

115. “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

116. “...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

117. “I photography women as I liked to fell in love of them.” - Aurélien Roulland

118. “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

119. “To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.” - Susan Sontag

120. “Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.” - Susan Sontag

121. “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

122. “The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.” - elliott erwitt

123. “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

124. “People, there's no such thing as, THE BEST CAMERA BRAND, but yes there will always be THE BEST CAMERA AT ANY GIVEN TIME. Technology will change, but not art.” - Ashraf Saharudin

125. “Judging by the photograph it seemed like I hadn’t been there at all. As if it was my camera that had been on holiday, and not me.” - Ida Løkås

126. “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

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

128. “The cliché comes not in what you shoot but in how you shoot it.” - David duChemin

129. “I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost.” - Nan Goldin

130. “The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it!” - Ansel Adams

131. “Regarding the creative: never assume you're the master, only the student. Your audience will determine if you're masterful.” - Don Roff