Quotes about Photography

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

Life is like photography; we develop from the negatives.

I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment. They become in a sense... symbolic of themselves. I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune teller - to find out how they are.

It's not the scene, it's the moment.

"There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are."

I wasn’t sure what was going on or what time it was or where I was or even, for that matter, who I was … but my gut told me something was terribly wrong. I opened my eyes slowly, as sensitive to light as a roll of film: just expose me and I’d vanish.

Every photo you take is a self-portrait.

You don't take a photograph, you quietly ask to borrow it.

It is my intention to present - through the medium of photography - intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators.

In my view you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it.

When I work, and in my art, I hold hands with God.

Reputation is seeming; character is being. Reputation is manufactured; character is grown. Reputation is your photograph; There is a vast difference between character and reputation. Reputation is what men think we are; character is what God knows us to be. Reputation is seeming; character is being. Reputation is the breath of men; character is the inbreathing of the eternal God. One may for a time have a good reputation and a bad character, or the reverse ; but not for long.

For many people the scent of certain plants can revive memories with a vividness that nothing else can equal, for the sense of smell can be extraordinarily evocative, bringing back pictures as sharp as photographs of scenes that and left the conscious mind.

Literally, no man ever sees himself as others see him. No photograph or reflection ever gives us the same slant on ourselves that others see. It has often been proved on the witness stand that no two people ever see the same accident precisely the same way. We see through different eyes and from different angles. But if we could see things as other people see them, we could come closer to knowing why they do what they do and why they say what they say.

Blessed be the inventor of photography! It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything else that has "cast up" in my time - this art by which even the "poor" can possess themselves of tolerable of their absent dear ones.

Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.

I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else. Excitement about the subject is the voltage which pushes me over the mountain of drudgery necessary to produce the final photograph.

Photography helps people to see.

Gardening can bring out the inner child, and sometimes, especially after all that time out in the hot sun, it can bring out the inner surrealist. When the urge comes over you to construct a zucchini zeppelin or a tomato truck, give in to your muse and then document [photograph] your masterpiece, preferably against an uncluttered background.

In my mind's eye, I visualize how a particular . . . sight and feeling will appear on a print. If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice.

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

PHOTOGRAPH, n. A picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. It is a little better than the work of an Apache, but not quite so good as that of a Cheyenne.