Quotes About Photography

It can be a trap of the photographer to think that his or her best pictures were the ones that were hardest to get.

—Timothy Allen

Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.

—Matt Hardy

The camera doesn’t make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But, you have to SEE.

—Ernst Haas

Nothing happens when you sit at home. I always make it a point to carry a camera with me at all times…I just shoot at what interests me at that moment.

—Elliott Erwitt

You’ve got to push yourself harder. You’ve got to start looking for pictures nobody else could take. You’ve got to take the tools you have and probe deeper.

—William Albert Allard

Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.

—Ansel Adams

Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.

—Henri Cartier-Bresson

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

—Susan Sontag

Photography is a transformation, not a reproduction.

—Ernst Haas

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

If it makes you laugh, if it makes you cry, if it rips out your heart, that’s a good picture.

—Eddie Adams

Skill in photography is acquired by practice and not by purchase.

—Percy W. Harris

I never have taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse.

—Diane Arbus

The best images are the ones that retain their strength and impact over the years, regardless of the number of times they are viewed.

—Anne Geddes

To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.

—Elliott Erwitt

When people ask what equipment I use – I tell them my eyes.

—~Anonymous

Never forget that all the great photographs in history were made with more primitive camera equipment than you currently own.

—Brooks Jensen

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

—Dorothea Lange

There are no bad pictures; that’s just how your face looks sometimes.

—Abraham Lincoln

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

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

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.

—Joan Miró

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

The camera basically is a license to explore.

—Jerry Uelsmann

A truly good photograph tells a story. It should connect to the reader. That’s all there is to it really. Things like composition, focus, colour, lighting and subject matter are all in a sense just fashionable. But the photos that tell stories are timeless.

—Leslie Dean Brown