Quotes on Photography

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


“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


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


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


“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


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


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


“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, The House At Riverton


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


“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, On Photography


“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


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


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


“I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.” 
― Mahatma Gandhi


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


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


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


“Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell.” 
― Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter


“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, The Mind's Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers


“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” 
― Susan Sontag


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


“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


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


“The Earth is Art, The Photographer is only a Witness ” 
― Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Earth from Above


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


“A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second. ” 
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet


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


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