PHOTOGRAPHY QUOTES

Our favourite creativity and photography quotes to inspire you!

All photographers and creative people need inspiration to flourish. If you’re creatively drained, or just looking for a captivating quote to use for a project, look no further. We share over 300 of our favourite creativity and photography quotes to inspire and motivate you!

These quotes by some of world’s the most influential artists and creative people are mostly true while at times they are only half-truths, contradictory, or even preposterous. And yet we would have been poorer for not having them. 

LIGHT AND SHADOW

For me, light is life – and the first light that I see is the sun. So, when I think about light, I think about the sun and nothing else. Window light is the most important light for me. When I take a picture using window light, I always think about what a long trip the light is making to reach my subject.

– Paulo Roversi

I have seized the light. I have arrested its flight.

– Louis Daguerre

In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary.

– Aaron Rose

Shadows play an integral role in letting sunlight permeate the scene. They provide a ‘setting’ that compliments the sun-kissed lights. Often, shadows will have a golden tint, or even a rosy red color that conveys a unique atmospheric glow.

– Jeanne Dobie

My philosophy on lighting is that any scene and any light situation can be enhanced by using flash in some capacity, even if it is only a subtle rim light, a hair light, or just a punch from a key light to lift the shadows.

– Trompie van der Berg

Available light is any damn light that is available!

– W. Eugene Smith

Play with natural light and practice a lot. Try shooting the same object with varying lighting conditions (different times of day, sidelight, backlight, different angles) and study what effects they have on your photos. The understanding of light will help you to take your photography to another level.

– Sarka Babicka

To learn the magic of light, get up before sunrise…and watch.

– Ted Grant

All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow. 

– Leo Tolstoy

Light is inseparable from shadow. Shadow lives on the edge of light. Shadow complements the light. It evokes feeling and imagination; it transforms ordinary objects into extraordinary subjects.

– Danie Bester

Always keep the direction of the light source clearly in mind and keep asking yourself, ‘How light is it?’ and ‘How dark is it?’ 

– Leoni Duff

A grey day provides the best light.

– Leonardo da Vinci

The eye is always caught by light, but shadows have more to say.

– Gregory Maguire

Once I learned to cook, I took to food photography like a duck to hoisin. My tip would be to keep it simple, clean and use daylight when you can.

– Steve Ryan

What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.

– John Berger

I never went to school for photography. I learned lighting by working as an assistant. I learned by looking at the photographs of the Masters of Photography and the paintings of the Great Masters. You never invent: you simply take your influences from the giants before you.

– Paulo Roversi

All the masterpieces of art contain both light and shadow. A happy life is not one filled with only sunshine, but one which used both light and shadow to produce beauty.

– Billy Graham

John Loengard, the picture editor at Life, always used to tell me, ‘If you want something to look interesting, don’t light all of it.’

Joe McNally

The subject is nothing, light is everything.

– Léonard Misonne

Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography.

– George Eastman

The photographer is a manipulator of light; photography is a manipulation of light.

– Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

Light is a thing that cannot be reproduced but must be represented by something else – by color.

– Paul Cezanne

You’ve got to taste the light, like my friend and fellow shooter Chip Maury says. And when you see light like this, trust me, it’s like a strawberry sundae with sprinkles.

– Joe McNally

Wherever there is light, one can photograph.

– Alfred Stieglitz

Wherever there is no light, one cannot photograph.

– Danie Bester

THE CAMERA AS A TOOL

Interviewer: Is that how you see the camera; simply as a tool? Like a brush?

Bresson: Exactly!

– Henri Cartier-Bresson

The fact is that relatively few photographers ever master their medium. Instead, they allow the medium to master them and go on and endless squirrel cage chase from new lens to new paper to new developer to new gadget, never staying with one piece of equipment long enough to learn its full capacities, becoming lost in a maze of technical information that is of little or no use since they don’t know what to do with it.

– Edward Weston

It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.

– Eve Arnold

The best camera is the one that’s with you.

Chase Jarvis

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

Let the subject generate its own photographs. Become a camera.

– Minor White

There is some kind of genius of the medium. Photographers don’t want to hear this by the way, but when you look at enough vernacular photography, all the diverse sorts, you begin to think is the camera that’s doing this work. The human operator is just the one pushing the button.

– Luc Sante

The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it.

– Ansel Adams

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

– Anonymous

For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.

– Henri Cartier-Bresson

The camera captures light, our minds capture images.

– Anonymous

Photography is not about cameras, gadgets and gismos. Photography is about Photographers. A camera didn’t make a great picture any more than a typewriter wrote a great novel.

Peter Adams

There are no accidental masterpieces in painting, but there are accidental masterpieces in photography.

Chuck Close

Get it out of your head that good cameras create good photos.

– Danie Bester

It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera… they are made with the eye, heart and head.

– Henri Cartier-Bresson

If you have something to say with a camera then show it, otherwise it’s better to bake a cake.

Jason Eskenazi

Gear is Good, but Vision is Better.

David duChemin

PHOTOGRAPHY AS SCIENCE AND ART

I was attracted to photography because it was technical, full of gadgets, and I was obsessed with science. But at some point, around fifteen or sixteen, I had a sense that photography could provide a bridge from the world of science to the world of art or image. Photography was a means of crossing into a new place I didn’t know.

– Adam Fuss

The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.

– Joan Miro

This photographic thing has changed the entire vision of the world. It will go through every activity of humanity – science, medicine, space, ESP, for peace, against peace, entertainment, television, movies, all of them – you will not find one without photography. 

– Lisette Model

Photography for me is a passion, a mixture of science and art that creates magic. If a day goes by without photography, it’s incomplete. 

– Scott MacQuarrie

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

– Leonardo da Vinci

 

Art is meant to disturb, science reassures.

– Georges Braque

 

Creative photography is where science and art break even.

The art is the challenge which you must meet every day: the technique you should learn to control with time. The science and the art of photography are really one, and not opposed to each other.

– Yousuf Karsh

The problem for me is that I’ve never actually studied photography, so it’s quite a steep learning curve. Cameras these days do so much for you automatically, but I still think there’s a point where you should actually know the technical side.

– Graeme Le Saux

Art is standing with one hand extended into the universe and one hand extended into the world, and letting ourselves be a conduit for passing energy. 

– Albert Einstein

THE ART OF SEEING

To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in 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

My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport

– Steve McCurry

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 extraordinary.

– David Bailey

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

– Anonymous

Letting go of yourself is an essential precondition of real seeing.

– Freeman Patterson

A photograph is usually looked at – seldom looked into

– Ansel Adams

Attention to detail is the primary difference between a snapshot and a photograph.

– Michael O’Brien

I always feel like the art’s there and I just see it, so it’s not really a lot of work.

– Damien Hirst

Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.

– Walker Evans

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

We never see a photograph all at once. Our vision doesn’t work that way. … We have to look at all the parts of the photograph and then assemble it in our minds eye. This is the one of the fascinating things about good art work. It always brings forth that element of imagination and requires you to use your mind to really see it, because your eye can’t possible see it all.

– Brooks Jensen

Photography teaches you to look. To appreciate all kinds of things.

– Saul Leiter

As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs.

– Sam Abell

Of what use are lens and light to those who lack in mind and sight?

– Anonymous

It’s been said that the role of the artist is to teach us to see and that’s true. However, the role of other artists is to teach me how they see. To learn how I see is something that cannot be taught but must be learned.

– Brooks Jensen

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

– Matt Hardy

Photography through the camera is an instrument of detection. We photograph not only what we know, but also what we don’t know.

– Lisette Model

The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?

– Edward Weston

It fascinates me that there is a variety of feeling about what I do. I’m not a premeditative photographer. I see a picture and I make it. If I had a chance, I’ would be out shooting all the time. You don’t have to go looking for pictures. The material is generous. You go out and the pictures are staring at you.

– Lee Friedlander

Looking at, studying, and absorbing good photography serves the same purpose for a beginning photographer. That is because learning the components of a good image – composition, lighting, gesture – and seeing those elements used differently over and over by different masters, makes it easier for a person to achieve the same end on his or her own over time. And there is simply is no alternative to this, no shortcut.

– Frank Van Riper

The camera makes you forget you’re there. It’s not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much.

– Annie Leibovitz 

Warhol was the ultimate voyeur, constantly observing people through the lens. He watched and listened but did not participate. Behind the camera, Warhol was in control.

– Alison Jackson

The eye should learn to listen before it looks.

– Robert Frank

I am not interested in shooting new things – I am interested to see things new.

– Ernst Haas

We must revolutionise our optical perception. We must remove the veil from our eyes. 

– Alexander Rodchenko

The essential things in life are seen, not with the eyes but with the heart.

– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.

– Paul Valery

THE ART OF VISUAL COMPOSITION

Choosing how I want the viewer’s eye to travel in the picture.

– Nelson Shanks

A composition is an arrangement, built out of parts, that aims at seamlessness.

– Eric Maisel

Developing a composition is a creative process involving intuition and thinking more than following rules.

– Alessandra Bitelli

Composition, an arbitrary, inexact process, appears to be guided best by intuition and chance rather than science.

– Peter Ciccariello

Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements which the painter uses to express his sentiments. In a picture every separate part will be visible and… everything which has no utility in the picture is for that reason harmful.

– Henri Matisse

The diagonal gives energy to a composition.

– Gail Siptak

The foreground is like the door to the composition, so it should have the biggest value and color temperature contrasts and the highest intensities to invite viewers in. The middle-ground contains the important things the viewer came for, so it should be subtler, like a pleasant conversation going on in the main room of the house. Finally, the background is like the walls of the house, supporting the middle-ground, so it should possess little contrast or intensity.

– Aleksander Titovets

I love the complicated logic of a perfect composition. It is not just the shapes and lines that make one travel through a painting. It’s the placement of the strongest colors, the sharpest lines, and the dominant shapes.

– Kathryn Stats

There is no better time to crop a bad composition than just before you press the shutter release. 

– Bryan Peterson

There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.

– Ansel Adams

Don’t look at the Flip Screen, Look Through it.

–Werner Herzog

Before you compose your picture it’s a good idea to ask yourself why you’re doing it.

– Anonymous

I just walk around, observing the subject from various angles until the picture elements arrange themselves into a composition that pleases my eye.

– Andre Kertesz

By having the big lines of the composition going out of the canvas, your imagination can wander beyond the edge. It will make it seem part of a large composition.

– Charles Hawthorne

When you feel like putting something into your picture or do not know what is the matter with it, take something out.

– Harvey Dunn

Good composition is like a suspension bridge; each line adds strength and takes none away… Making lines run into each other is not composition. There must be motive for the connection. Get the art of controlling the observer – that is composition.

– Robert Henri

The composition gets strengthened by adding lines that don’t exist in nature. That language has much more impact than a literal painting. The beautiful ‘composed’ scene, which follows the invented lines, talks to us.

– Tatjana Mirkov-Popovicki

When I begin a composition, I try to clearly understand the idea behind the subject… my subconscious tends to reinforce the idea by complementing and contrasting colours in patterns around the subject, leading mind and vision to the center of the composition.

– Ken Strong

Consulting the rules of composition before taking a photograph is like consulting the laws of gravity before going for a walk. 

 Edward Weston

As in construction, correct support is a priority. Everything must be balanced, straight, level, plumb, and square.

– Marvin Humphrey

All you need to do is walk away from your painting several feet, turn around and look. This… will keep you looking at the entire composition all the way through the process.

– Sandra Taylor Hedges

It is important that the artist… understands the importance of composition, the golden mean… the universal symbols… The concept of perfect balance is an intricate part of this process, not only in the art but in our lives.

Kathleen Carrillo

I find a single focus in the scene and then play everything off that one thing.

Kenn Backhaus

The anatomy of the picture is always more important than the anatomy of the subject.

– Marc Awodey

Realtors preach – ‘Location, Location, Location,’ while artists should preach – ‘Composition, Composition, Composition.’

– Doug Mays

I have learned from nature that all is equal… all is equal and in balance. I see everything as fitting together.

– Joseph Raffael

When we look at a painting, listen to a piece of music, read a novel, or watch a movie we are taking in the artist’s composition. The composition is the totality of the work.

– Mike Svob

To compose a subject well means no more than to see and present it in the strongest manner possible.

– Edward Weston

Even in front of nature one must compose.

– Edgar Degas

What can I do to my composition to make it say more? There is no wrong time in the planning process to ask this question, and the creative thought can come at any moment.

– Tom Huntley

A good photograph is knowing where to stand.

– Ansel Adams

I like it when one is not certain what one sees.

– Saul Leiter

ESSENCE OF THE PORTRAIT

Photography is like a moment, an instant. You need a half-second to get the photo. So it’s good to capture people when they are themselves.

Patrick Demarchelier

A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.

– Edward Steichen

When you go to take someone’s picture, the first thing they say is, what you want me to do? Everyone is very awkward.

– Annie Leibovitz

My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.

– Helmut Newton

You have a living, breathing subject that you need to make a connection with. 

Brian Smith

There is no single form or style of portraiture. Portraiture means individualism and as such means diversity, self-expression, private point of view. The most successful images seem to be those which exist on several planes at once and which reflect the fantasy and understanding of many.

 Peter Bunnell 

There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.

– Robert Frank

What I look for in pictures I take: eyes, hands, head tilt, body language, background and use of space. 

– Caroline Mueller

A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.

– Edward Steichen

It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.

– Alfred Eisenstaedt

I like to photograph anyone before they know what their best angles are.

– Ellen Von Unwerth

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

He owned an expensive camera that required thought before you pressed the shutter, and I quickly became his favourite 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

A good portrait is incredibly hard to create, there is too much temptation to pander to the individual rather than portray them as they really were. 

– Philippe Halsman

When you photograph a face… you photograph the soul behind it.

– Jean-Luc Godard

We shall never know all the good that a simple smile can do.

– Mother Teresa

People are at their best when they can be natural. And that’s the hardest thing as a photographer.

Platon

Mapplethorpe presented the body as a sexual object, separating it from the humanity of the person. He added nothing to photography as a medium. I hold his work in low regard.

– Jerzy Kosinski

The dog is the perfect portrait subject. He doesn’t pose. He isn’t aware of the camera.

– Patrick Demarchelier

I never made a person look bad. They do that themselves. The portrait is your mirror. It’s you. 

– August Sander

So many people dislike themselves so thoroughly that they never see any reproduction of themselves that suits. None of us is born with the right face. It’s a tough job being a portrait photographer. 

– Imogen Cunningham

It’s one thing to make a picture of what a person looks like, it’s another thing to make a portrait of who they are.

– Paul Caponigro

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what’s going on, but it’s representative.

– Annie Leibovitz

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter

– Oscar Wilde

THE DECISIVE MOMENT AND TIMELESSNESS OF PHOTOGRAPHY

In photography, you’ve got to be quick, quick, quick, quick. Like an animal and a prey.

– Henri Cartier-Bresson

Photography is a magical kind of art that allows people to preserve time and moments, and to describe the world the way they see it.

– Sahara Sanders

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 Siskind

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

We 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. We cannot develop and print a memory.  

– Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

– Joan Miro

I don’t just look at the thing itself or at the reality itself; I look around the edges for that little askew moments, kind of like what makes up our lives. Those slightly awkward, lovely moments.

– Keith Carter

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

– Karl Lagerfeld

There is a brief moment when all there is in a man’s mind and soul and spirit are reflected in his eyes, his hands, his attitude. This is the moment to record.

– Yousuf Karsh

Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes a precise moment in time.

– Henri Cartier-Bresson

With photography, a new language has been created. Now for the first time, it is possible to express reality by reality. We can look at an impression as long as we wish, we can delve into it and, so to speak, renew past experiences at will.

– Ernst Haas

Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.

– Susan Sontag

It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to 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

A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you.

– Brigitte Bardot

Photography is not like painting. 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

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

Bruce Gilden

Portraits are the most intimate photographs. The image will survive the subject.

– Victor Skrebneski

MASTERING THE CRAFT OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken by the wind.

– Johannes Brahms

I am a professional photographer by trade and an amateur photographer by vocation.

– Elliot Erwitt

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

–  Percy W. Harri

When you see a picture printed in an exhibition, or in a book, you don’t see all of the pictures that went into creating that picture.

– David Levene

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.

– Dorothea Lange

A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.

― Richard Bach

Artistic self-indulgence is the mark of an amateur. The temptation to make scenes, to appear late, to call in sick, not to meet deadlines, not to be organized, is at heart a sign of your own insecurity and at worst the sign of an amateur.

– Harold Prince

What they call talent is nothing but the capacity for doing continuous hard work in the right way.

– Winslow Homer

The ability to make a truly artistic photograph is not acquired off-hand but is the result of an artistic instinct coupled with years of labor.

– Alfred Stieglitz

The real issue is not talent as an independent element, but talent in relationship to will, desire and persistence.

– Milton Glaser

Don’t lose your visual voice due to inconsistency. Without consistency, your vision will be worthless. Your work will be just another tiny speck amongst all the visual clutter out there. 

– Danie Bester

Something mediocre is better than nothing, and often the near misses are the beckoning hands that bring you to perfection just around the blind corner. 

– Sally Mann

Creativity is good for somebody who is a good craftsman. If you know the basics, if you know your profession really well, then you can navigate and try other things.

– Wolfgang Puck

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

FEELING AND EMOTION

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

Photography is all about light, composition and, most importantly, emotion. 

– Larry Wilder

Art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.

– Rainbow Rowell

A work of art must not be something that leaves a man unmoved, something he passes by with a casual glance. It has to make him react, feel strongly, start creating too, if only in his imagination.

– Pablo Picasso

At this time in the history of photography, everything has been done. All the novelties have been done. All we have to look for now is, as a picture, does it move my heartstrings? If it does, why should I condemn it just because it happens to look like something Weston did?

– Minor White

Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.

– Don McCullin

Often while traveling with a camera we arrive just as the sun slips over the horizon of a moment, too late to expose the film, only time enough to expose our hearts.

– Minor White

INSPIRATION FOR PHOTOGRAPHY

If you want to be a better photographer stand in front of more interesting stuff.

– Jim Richardson

Of what use are lens and light to those who lack in mind and sight?

– Anonymous

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a leitmotiv.

– Henri Cartier-Bresson

Dear Lord, grant me the grace of wonder. Surprise me, amaze me, awe me in every crevice of your universe. Each day enrapture me with your marvellous things without number. I do not ask to see the reason for it all: I ask only to share the wonder of it all.

– Rabbi Joshua Abraham Heschel

I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.

– Diane Arbus

If I saw something in my viewfinder that looked familiar to me, I would do something to shake it up.

– Gary Winogrand

The best photographs you make will be the things you are most passionate about. Go photograph those things that you really care about deeply.

– Brooks Jensen

Ultimately, photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive when it thinks.

– Roland Barthes

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

Sometimes I arrive just when God’s ready to have someone click the shutter.

– Ansel Adams

There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.

– Ansel Adams

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

No matter how much crap you gotta plow through to stay alive as a photographer, no matter how many bad assignments, bad days, bad clients, snotty subjects, obnoxious handlers, wigged-out art directors, technical disasters, failures of the mind, body, and will, all the shoulda’s, coulda’s, and woulda’s that befuddle our brains and creep into our dreams, always remember to make room to shoot what you love. It’s the only way to keep your heart beating as a photographer.

– Joe McNally

Art is either revolution or plagiarism.

– Paul Gauguin

If you are bored with your own photography you are really bored with what you are photographing, so pick a new subject about which you are knowledgeable and enthusiastic.

– Bill Jay

You can find pictures anywhere. It’s simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what’s around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy.

– Elliott Erwitt

If you’re not having fun, your pictures will reflect that.

– Joe McNally

Only photograph what you love.

– Tim Walker

A lot of people think that when you have grand scenery, such as you have in Yosemite, that photography must be easy.

– Galen Rowell

I also found inspiration from the paintings of William Turner and other prominent artists from the Romantic and Impressionist periods. Looking at their paintings, and at the photos of the Pictorialists, I thought they were so much deeper, moodier, and thought-provoking than the pretty postcard pictures we are bombarded with daily.

– Danie Bester

A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.

– Annie Leibovitz

I think life is too short not to be doing something which you really believe in.

– Steve McCurry

PHOTOGRAPHY AS ART

The art of photography is created without theories and without a continuous artistic tradition, but by amateurs who are discovering by making pictures.

– Peter Galassi

When art critics get together, they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together, they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.

– Pablo Picasso

If it doesn’t sell; it isn’t creative.

David Ogilvy

When it comes to art, it’s important not to hide the madness.

– Atticus

 

I think photographers did plant their tripod feet in the places where the easels of the painters had stood.

– Mark Haworth-Booth

 

Everybody who is sensitive is an artist.

– Henri Cartier-Bresson

Photographing a cake can be art.

– Irving Penn

The greatest photographs are made by artists who pick up the camera, rather than by photographers who decide to make art.

– Stewart Harve

 

CREATIVITY AND THE CREATIVE PROCESS

If you’re not in a state of play, you can’t make anything.

– Paula Scher

Great things are not done by impulse, but a series of small things brought together.

– Vincent Van Gogh

In the act of creativity being careful guarantees sameness and mediocrity.

– George Lois

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it. 

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

– Scott Adams

Photography has no rules, it is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it is achieved.

– Bill Brandt

You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life.

– Salvador Dalí

The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.

– Pablo Picasso

You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.

– Maya Angelou

As you navigate through the rest of your life, be open to collaboration. Other people and other people’s ideas are often better than your own. Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life.

– Amy Poehler

Great photography is always on the edge of failure.

– Garry Winogrand

I get my best Ideas in Taxi Cabs, sitting in traffic, drooling… I am allowing my subconscious to take over.

– Paula Scher

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.

– Steve Jobs

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

– Ansel Adams

Your first 10, 000 photographs are your worst.

– Henri Cartier-Bresson

Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.

– Charles Mingus

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. 

–  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.

– Joe McNally

Our duty is to experiment.

– Alexander Rodchenko

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

– Albert Einstein

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

– Gustave Flaubert

Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art.

– Susan Sontag

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion. 

– Jack Kerouac

But out of limitations comes creativity.

– Debbie Allen

An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.

– Edwin Land

FOOD PHOTOGRAPHY

Try to make sure there are complementary colours in the picture; there is nothing worse and uninspiring than photographing just brown food. For instance yellow, red and green; or green, purple and brown; grey silver and yellow etc. But keep it simple.

– Joakim Blockstrom

Play with natural light and practice a lot. Try shooting the same object with varying lighting conditions (different times of day, sidelight/backlight, different angles) and study what effects they have on your photos. Understanding light will help you to take your photography to another level.

– Sarka Babicka

I don’t think I ever noticed how beautiful produce is until I began photographing it. That sounds kind of weird, I know, but really, food can be very pretty, and I really enjoy finding an interesting way to see and document it. My main tip would be to pay more attention to the light than the food, however. The lone vegetable under interesting light can (and probably will) be more striking than the most meticulously styled yet poorly lit table.

Anything can be photogenic, even a big chunk of raw tuna! But first you need to find your style, whatever it may be, I never thought I could photograph food because I don’t do studio shots, but I was glad to find out there’s room for many different styles.

– Carol Sachs

Try to establish your own style so people can recognise your work. I don’t think I had a break as such; I’m still new and learning all the time. Working with creative people always inspires me greatly.

– Keiko Oikawa

My first break in food photography came, too long ago to mention, working for Marie Claire with Nigel Slater. At that time I used a 10” by 8” plate camera. When you look at a 10 by 8 transparency every mark, blemish, texture and reflection become a significant part of the whole, so that all the elements find a balance and hold their own within the frame.

– Jonathan Lovekin

Never eat your subject before you’ve got the shot.

– Toby Glanville

Preparation is key. It’s essential to make sure you have everything you could possibly need close to hand. It’s not magic – it’s just about well-prepared food and carefully chosen props.

– Rick Morris Pushinsky

Once I’d learned to cook myself, I took to food photography like a duck to hoisin. My tip would be to keep it simple, clean and use daylight when you can.

– Steve Ryan

Challenge yourself with projects shooting little food recipes or perhaps your favourite dish, from ingredients to the finished product. Style it with things you already have in your cupboard! It’s really the best exercise you can do that also comes with a steep learning curve and a chance to find your style in the comfort of your home. Plus, while it might be cold by the time you’re all done, you still get to eat it all!

– Shini Park

PERSONAL VISION AND STYLE

The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.

– Edward Steichen

Every person has their own colour. 

– Haruki Murakami

There’s a time when people say your work is revolutionary, but you have to keep being revolutionary. I can’t keep shooting pop stars all my life. You have to keep changing, keep pushing yourself, looking for the new, the unusual.

– Rankin

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

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

– Henry Ward Beecher

Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn’t look like somebody else’s work.

– William Klein

The people who hire me as a wedding photographer hire me not just because of my photographic style, they hire me because of the style of my personality. My style and personality match, so they know they’re getting a genuine style.

– Jared Platt 

I think being different, going against the grain of society is the greatest thing in the world.

– Elijah Wood

Every good painter paints what he is. 

– Jackson Pollock

Here’s the dilemma and the strength of photography. It is the easiest medium in which to be competent, but it is the hardest medium in which to have personal vision that is readily identifiable.

– Chuck Close

Art is not in the eye of the beholder. It’s in the soul of the artist.

– Seth Godin

Anything can be photogenic, even a big chunk of raw tuna! But first you need to find your style, whatever it may be, I never thought I could photograph food because I don’t do studio shots, but I was glad to find out there’s room for many different styles.

– Carol Sachs

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

– Oscar Wilde

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

Tell your own story, and you will be interesting.

– Louise Bourgeois 

I don’t believe a person has a style. What people have is a way of photographing what is inside them. What is there comes out.

– Sebastiao Salgado

I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.

– Frida Kahlo

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

– Oscar Wilde

Challenge yourself with projects shooting little food recipes or perhaps your favourite dish, from ingredients to the finished product. Style it with things you already have in your cupboard! It’s really the best exercise you can do that also comes with a steep learning curve and a chance to find your style in the comfort of your home. Plus, while it might be cold by the time, you’re all done, you still get to eat it all!

– Shini Park

The mystery is not in the technique, but in each of us

– Harry Callahan

There are so many good photographers out there that create extraordinary work all the time, so to compete you have to actually not compete. You have to do something that is just yours. 

– Erik Almas

Photography is capturing reality; from the artist’s perspective. Art is a creation; derived from the artist’s perception.

– Adrian Leslie Lobo

My best photographs always had a strong personal vision. If they didn’t communicate a vision or an emotion, they failed.

– Galen Rowell

An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success.

– Henri Matisse

If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.

– Emile Zola

Light meters read; photographers interpret.

– Catherine Jo Morgan

COLOUR, OR BLACK AND WHITE?

All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.

– Marc Chagall

In my photography, colour and composition are inseparable. I see in colour.

– William Albert Allard

I think it’s because it was an emotional story, and emotions come through much stronger in black and white. Color is distracting in a way, it pleases the eye, but it doesn’t necessarily reach the heart.

– Kim Hunter

I believe that the essence of photography is black and white. Color is but a deviance

– Sarah Moon

Black and white is abstract; color is not. Looking at a black and white photograph, you are already looking at a strange world.

– Joel Sternfeld

The way I have always looked at it is the world is in color. And there’s nothing we can do about that.

– William Eggleston

Of all God’s gifts to the sighted man, color is holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.

 – John Ruskin

The right use of color can make any composition work.

– Fairfield Porter

Black and white presents the viewer with a single message; it gets rid of the complexities and differences of colour. It forces the eye to examine the content; it keeps the mind free from excess data.

– Danie Bester

Black and white are the colours of photography. They symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is subjected.

– Robert Frank

In black and white there are more colors than color photography, because you are not blocked by any colors so you can use your experiences, your knowledge, and your fantasy, to put colors into black and white.

– Anders Petersen

Color is descriptive. Black and white is interpretive.

– Eliott Erwitt

When you photograph people in colour, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in and white, you photograph their souls!

– Ted Grant

Try to make sure there are complementary colours in the picture; there is nothing worse and uninspiring than photographing just brown food. For instance yellow, red and green; or green, purple and brown; grey silver and yellow etc. But keep it simple.

– Joakim Blockstrom

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way. Things I had no words for.

– Georgia O’Keefe

The chief function of color should be to serve expression.

– Henri Matisse

One very important difference between color and monochromatic photography is this: in black and white you suggest; in color you state. Much can be implied by suggestion, but statement demands certainty… absolute certainty.

– Paul Outerbridge

Color! What a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams.

– Paul Gauguin

I’ve been forty years discovering that the queen of all colors is black.

 – Henri Mattise

Color is like cooking. The cook puts in more or less salt, that’s the difference!

– Josef Albers

To see in color is a delight for the eye but to see in black and white is a delight for the soul.

– Andri Cauldwell

THE LOVE AND PASSION FOR PHOTOGRAPHY

I found that the camera was a comforting companion. It opened up new worlds and gave me access to people’s most intimate moments. I discovered the privilege of seeing life in all its complexity, the thrill of learning something new every day. When I was behind a camera, it was the only place in the world I wanted to be.

– Lynsey Addario

Photography is a love affair with life.

– Burk Uzzle

I guess art itself is insane. Its actual function is rarely clear, and yet people give their hearts and souls and lives to it and have for all of history.

– Damien Chazelle

Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.

– Diane Arbus

Once photography enters your bloodstream, it’s like a disease.

– Anonymous

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

– Dorothea Lange

EDITING AND PRINTING

Those who want to be serious photographers, you’re really going to have to edit your work. You’re going to have to understand what you’re doing. You’re going to have to not just shoot, shoot, shoot. To stop and look at your work is the most important thing you can do.

– Annie Leibovitz

Today there is too much retouching, and I don’t like it, except on me.

– Carine Roitfeld

I do not object to retouching, dodging or accentuation as long as they do not interfere with the natural qualities of photographic technique.

– Alfred Stieglitz

A picture is worth a thousand words; A fine art print so much more.

– Steve Denby

The process of editing is what I enjoy most – putting the pieces together and making sense out of them.

– Christian Marclay

I shoot sort of like a documentarian, but I print like a painter. All my stuff is shot with natural light on a tripod. Untouched, and unstaged – with the exception of the portraits that are all staged to a point—but still are made using natural light in a fairly undirected way. In the darkroom I’ll twist it all around in any way I find that works that still feels real to me. It is important for me that whatever I come up with always seems like it actually could have happened.

– Todd Hido

Please don’t retouch my wrinkles. It took me so long to earn them.

– Anna Magnani

My feeling is that for years now it has taken a much too big part in how women are being visually defined today. Heartless retouching should not be the chosen tool to represent women in the beginning of this century.

– Peter Lindbergh

A photograph doesn’t feel real until it is a tangible physical object I can hold in my hand.

– Stephen Johnson

If you find yourself out shooting a client and you’re saying in your head ‘oh I’ll just fix that later in photoshop’ stop what you’re doing and slap yourself as hard as you can. You’re being mediocre.

– Zack Arias

My aesthetic gets simpler every year as I rely less on gimmicks and more on powerful content.

– Anna Kuperberg

My passport photo is one of the most remarkable photographs I have ever seen- no retouching, no shadows, no flattery-just stark me.

– Anne Morrow Lindbergh

When you take something apart, you get a great sense of what it took to originally put it together.

– Christian Marclay

Editing cannot be taught. Developing your own taste cannot be taught.

– Ellen Datlow

PHOTOGRAPHY: TRUTH OR FICTION?

A photograph of a woman crying tells me nothing about grief. Or a photograph of a woman ecstatic tells me nothing about ecstasy. What is the nature of these emotions? The problem with photography is that it only deals with appearances.

– Duane Michals

Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes realer than reality.

– Alfred Stieglitz

The steady eyes of the crow and the camera’s candid eye see as honestly as they know how but they lie.

– W.H. Auden

A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.

– Diane Arbus

The picture that you took with your camera is the imagination you want to create with reality. 

– Scott Lorenzo

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

― Richard Avedon

Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.

– Garry Winogrand

Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths.

– Eddie Adams

The magic of photography is metaphysical. What you see in the photograph isn’t what you saw at the time. The real skill of photography is organized visual lying.

– Terence Donovan

I don’t believe that one photograph is better than another; rather one is more interesting than another. So, basically, ‘you get what you take’. If the objects in front of the camera are interesting enough ‘you take them’, and if they are not ‘you make them.

– Obie Oberholzer

With photography, I like to create fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society’s natural prejudice and giving this a twist.

– Martin Parr

Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths.

– Eddie Adams

Myth stories are the foundation of more blockbuster movies than any other genre by far. 

– John Truby

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