101 Inspiring Photography Quotes

Quotes We mean inspiring words, which would pronounce every letter of elegance and the noble way of doing photography. So many words with extreme clarity and intense synonym all making you march towards the undying passion for photography and what not.

This Post gives you some spellbinding quotes you always wanted to listen to and improve your elegance within photography as well as a photographer. Think about them, read them word by word and am sure these golden words from great photographers will reap you some fantastic rewards. These quotes are uttered over experience, over failure and above success.

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

“A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they’ll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won’t do a thing for you if you don’t have anything in your head or in your heart.” – Arnold Newman

“Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.” – Imogen Cunningham

“Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.” – Peter Adams

“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” – Ansel Adams

“If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough” – Robert Capa

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

“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

“In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.” – Alfred Stieglitz

“I am not interested in rules or conventions. Photography is not a sport.” – Bill Brandt

“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

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

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

“I don’t want anyone to appreciate the light or the palette of tones. I want my pictures to inform, to provoke discussion – and to raise money.” – Sebastiao Salgado

“If I have any ‘message’ worth giving to a beginner it is that there are no short cuts in photography.” – Edward Weston

“Of course it’s all luck.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson

“There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.” – Ansel Adams

“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

“The photograph itself doesn’t interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.” – Henri Cartier Bresson

“The world just does not fit conveniently into the format of a 35mm camera.” – W. Eugene Smith

“Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.” – Garry Winogrand

“There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.” – Ernst Haas

“Look, I’m not an intellectual – I just take pictures.” – Helmut Newton

“Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.” – Berenice Abbott

“No place is boring, if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and have a pocked full of unexposed film.” – Rober Adams

“Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.” – Yousuf Karsh

“It’s more important for a photographer to have very good shoes, than to have a very good camera” – Sebastiao Salgado

“I always thought good photos were like good jokes. If you have to explain it, it just isn’t that good.” – Anonymous

” If you’re photographing in color you show the color of their clothes – if you use black and white, you will show the color of their soul.” – Anonymous

“Buying a Nikon doesn’t make you a photographer. It makes you a Nikon owner.” – Anonymous

“One photo out of focus is a mistake, ten photos out of focus are an experimentation, one hundred photos out of focus are a style.” – Anonymous

“I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do – that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.” – Diane Arbus

“Most of my photos are grounded in people, I look for the unguarded moment, the essential soul peeking out, experience etched on a persons face.” – Steve McCurry

”I have to shoot three cassettes of film a day, even when not ‘photographing’, in order to keep the eye in practice.” – Josef Koudelka

“Remember that the person you are photographing is 50% of the portrait and you are the other 50%. You need the model as much as he or she needs you. If they don’t want to help you, it will be a very dull picture.” – Lord Patrick Lichfield

“Photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future.” – Sally Mann

“A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.” – Eudora Welty

“A photograph has picked up a fact of life, and that fact will live forever.” – Raghu Rai

“Results are uncertain even among the more experienced photographers.” – Matthew Brady

“It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.” – Alfred Eisenstaedt

“The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible” – Oscar Wilde

“I began to realize that the camera sees the world differently than the human eye and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed.” – Galen Rowell

“I only know how to approach a place by walking. For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown, or the secret heat of the known awaits just around the corner.” – Alex Webb

“I see something special and show it to the camera. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs.” – Sam Abell

“I went into photography because it seemed like the perfect vehicle for commenting on the madness of today’s existence.” – Robert Mapplethorpe

“I think the best pictures are often on the edges of any situation, I don’t find photographing the situation nearly as interesting as photographing the edges.” – William Albert Allard

”It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary.” – David Bailey

“The two most engaging powers of a photograph are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.” – William Thackeray

”I guess I’ve shot about 40,000 negatives and of these I have about 800 pictures I like.” – Harry Callahan

“I don’t get wrapped up in technique and the like.” – Fay Godwin

“What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.” – John Berger

“My photography is a reflection, which comes to life in action and leads to meditation. Spontaneity – the suspended moment – intervenes during action, in the viewfinder.” – Abbas

“If you are out there shooting, things will happen for you. If you’re not out there, you’ll only hear about it.” – Jay Maisel

“A photographer strives to be fully aware of every moment, and to be one with all others every moment.” – Anonymous

“Generally, the French highly promote culture and the arts, and photography is in their blood.” – Herb Ritts

“Looking and seeing are two different things. What matters is the relationship with the subject.” – Christophe Agou

“When you photograph a face . . .you photograph the soul behind it.” – Jean-Luc Godard

“There are no rules and regulations for perfect composition. If there were we would be able to put all the information into a computer and would come out with a masterpiece. We know that’s impossible. You have to compose by the seat of your pants.” – Arnold Newman

“Every time someone tells me how sharp my photos are, I assume that it isn’t a very interesting photograph. If it were, they would have more to say.” – Author Unknown

“Photography is the art of frozen time… the ability to store emotion and feelings within a frame.” – Meshack Otieno

“When you photograph people in colour you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in B&W, you photograph their souls.” – Ted Grant

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

“There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph.” – Robert Heinecken

“The subject matter is so much more important than the photographer.” – Gordon Parks

“Emotion or feeling is really the only thing about pictures I find interesting. Beyond that is is just a trick.” – Christopher Anderson

“I threw myself into this artform because photography had given me a new sense of mission and identity.” – Bob Anderson

“Light glorifies everything. It transforms and ennobles the most commonplace and ordinary subjects. The object is nothing, light is everything.” – Leonard Missone

“If the photographer is interested in the people in front of his lens, and if he is compassionate, it’s already a lot. The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.” – Eve Arnold

“Be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence.” – Minor White

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

“I didn’t choose photography. Photography chose me.” – Gerardo Suter

“The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.” – Robert Doisneau

“Photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world.” – Bruno Barbey

“Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion…the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.” – Dorothea Lange

“You can give everything to photography but photography will give you only 1 thing – happiness.” – Anonymous

“When I photograph, what I’m really doing is seeking answers to things.” – Wynn Bullock

“There will be times when you will be in the field without a camera. And, you will see the most glorious sunset or the most beautiful scene that you have ever witnessed. Don’t be bitter because you can’t record it. Sit down, drink it in, and enjoy it for what it is!” – DeGriff

“Sometimes you can tell a large story with a tiny subject.” – Eliot Porter

“Ultimately photography is about who you are. It’s the truth in relation to yourself. And seeking truth becomes a habit.” – Leonard Freed

“One doesn’t stop seeing. One doesn’t stop framing. It doesn’t turn off and turn on. It’s on all the time.” – Annie Leibovitz

“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

“The artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.” – Paul Strand

“My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.” – Steve McCurry

“The photograph is completely abstracted from life, yet it looks like life. That is what has always excited me about photography.” – Richard Kalvar

“Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask ‘how’, while others of a more curious nature will ask ‘why’. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.” – Man Ray

“Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper… the photographer begins with the finished product.” – Edward Steichen

“I just think it’s important to be direct and honest with people about why you’re photographing them and what you’re doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul.” – Mary Ellen Mark

“Above all, I know that life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference. Opinion often consists of a kind of criticism. But criticism can come out of love. It is important to see what is invisible to others.” – Robert Frank

“Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.” – Walker Evans

“I want the viewers to be moved into the lives of the people that they are looking at, the visual experience is incredibly emotional.” – Paul Fusco

“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” – Diane Arbus

“At 42, I decided to become a photographer because it offered a means of creative thought and action. I didn’t rationalize this, I just felt it intuitively and followed my intuition, which I have never regretted.” – Wynne Bullock

“I really don’t have any idea about photography, but I take pictures.” – Alex Majoli

“There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson

“A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective.” – Irving Penn

“I think good dreaming is what leads to good photographs.” – Wayne Miller

“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 Sussman

“The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don’t belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation.” – Susan Meiselas

“I love the people I photograph. I mean, they’re my friends. Ive never met most of them or I don’t know them at all, yet through my images I live with them.” – Bruce Gilden

“In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.” – Alfred Steiglitz

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