67 Inspiring Photography Quotes

In the realm of photography, every click of the shutter captures not just a moment but a story, a feeling, and an artistry all its own. For those who revel in this visual medium, words often complement the images, enhancing the experience and insight offered by a perfect picture. Whether you're a seasoned professional, an enthusiastic hobbyist, or simply an admirer of the craft, inspiring photography quotes can provide a fresh perspective, ignite creativity, and bring a deeper appreciation of your work. In this blog post, we've carefully curated a collection of the top 67 photography quotes to elevate your passion for capturing the world through your lens.

1. “It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down....” - Kate Morton

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

3. “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” - Susan Sontag

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. “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

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

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

8. “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

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

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

11. “We all perform. It's what we do for each other all the time, deliberately or unintionally. It's a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognized as what we'd like to be.--PERFORMANCE” - Richard Avedon

12. “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

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

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

15. “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

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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “There are no bad pictures; that's just how your face looks sometimes.” - Abraham Lincoln

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

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “[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

28. “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

29. “Hence the detail which interests me is not, or at least is not strictly intentional, and probably must not be so; it occurs in the field of the photographed thing like a supplement that is at once inevitable and delightful; it does not necessarily attest to the photographer's art; it says only that the photographer was there, or else, still more simply, that he could not (i)not(i) photograph the partial object at the same time as the total object (how could Kerész have 'separated' the dirt road from the violinist walking on it?). The Photographer's 'second sight' does not consist in 'seeing' but in being there. And above all, imitating Orpheus, he must not turn back to look at what he is leading — what hi is giving to me!” - Roland Barthes

30. “In 1850, August Salzmann photographed, near Jerusalem, the road to Beith-Lehem (as it was spelled at the time): nothing but stony ground, olive trees; but three tenses dizzy my consciousness: my present, the time of Jesus, and that of the photographer, all this under the instance of 'reality' — and no longer through the elaborations of the text, whether fictional or poetic, which itself is never credible down to the root.” - Roland Barthes

31. “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

32. “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

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

34. “Don't we all know that art is dangerous. You play it - then you live it.” - Stefan Balint

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

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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book. "No one sees the barn," he said finally. A long silence followed. "Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn."He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies." There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides. "Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism." Another silence ensued. "They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said.” - Don DeLillo

41. “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

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

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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

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. “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

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

50. “Keep shooting. It helps the model's confidence. Flashing strobes are likeapplause.” - A.K. Nicholas

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

52. “Patience is the essence of clicking great Photographs!!” - Abhijeet Sawant

53. “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

54. “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

55. “...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

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

57. “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

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

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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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