58 Photography Quotes To Inspire

Photography is more than just a hobby or profession; it's a way of seeing the world through a unique lens, capturing moments that tell stories and evoke emotions. To celebrate this beautiful art form, we've curated a collection of the top 58 photography quotes that are sure to inspire photographers of all levels. These quotes come from renowned photographers, artists, and visionaries who have mastered the craft and share their profound insights. Whether you're a seasoned photographer or just starting out, these words of wisdom will ignite your creative passion and deepen your understanding of the power of photography.

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. “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

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

5. “Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.” - Marc Riboud

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

7. “Sometimes I arrive just when God's ready to have somone click the shutter.” - Ansel Adams

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

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

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

11. “When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.” - Robert Frank

12. “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

13. “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

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

15. “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

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

17. “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

18. “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

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

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

21. “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

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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

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

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

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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

41. “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

42. “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

43. “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

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

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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

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

49. “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

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

51. “Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.” - Susan Sontag

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “How can we hold onto those fleeting moments in our lives? Hold onto the moments that otherwise evaporate into the forgotten past? Or moments that become faded and morphed into our own version of reality as they sit in the corners of our memories, losing their truth and shifting focus? The only way to hold onto these moments and share them for years to come, in all their beauty and truth and glorious imperfections, without losing accuracy is through a photograph.” - Rosanne Moreland

56. “Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.” - David Alan Harvey

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

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