19th-century Photographer Quotes

Man Ray

Henry Fox Talbot

El Lissitsky

Alphonse Mucha

Giovanni Verga

Julia Margaret Cameron

Edward Steichen

Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. [It is] a major force in explaining man to man.

Edward Steichen

When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty to them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has almost the embodiment of a prayer.

Julia Margaret Cameron

We consider the triumph of the constructive method to be essential for our present. We find it not only in the new economy and in the development of the industry, but also in the psychology of our contemporaries of art. Veshch will champion constructive art, whose mission is not, after all, to embellish life, but to organize it.

Pray for the repose of his soul. He was so tired.

Frederick Rolfe

Let me here call attention to one of the most universally popular mistakes that have to do with photography - that of classing supposedly excellent work as professional, and using the term amateur to convey the idea of immature productions and to excuse atrociously poor photographs.

Alfred Stieglitz

An effort impelled by desire must also have an automatic or subconscious energy to aid its realization.

The heart gets tired too; and it falls apart bit by bit, like an old cloth wears out in the wash.

Besides combining her greatest skill and artistry in the production of snowflakes, Nature generously fashions the most beautiful specimens on a very thin plane so that they are specially adapted for photomicrographical study.

Wilson A. Bentley

If I am interested, amazed, stimulated to work, that is sufficient reason to thank the gods, and go ahead!

Photography is thus brought within reach of every human being who desires to preserve a record of what he sees… and enables the fortunate possessor to go back by the light of his own fireside to scenes which would otherwise fade from memory and be lost.

No Southern people ever seem to possess the energy of their Northern brothers, and in Sicily a dolce far niente life is much enjoyed. Time is no object. According to Pliny, Aristhomacus watched the life of the bee carefully for fifty-eight years, which is just the sort of work a Sicilian of to-day would like.

Ethel Brilliana Tweedie

Cats seldom make mistakes, and they never make the same mistake twice.

Carl Van Vechten

Long ago it was said that 'one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.' That was true then. It did not know because it did not care. The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate, of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat.

On the outside grows the furside, on the inside grows the skinside; So the furside is the outside, and the skinside is the inside.

Herbert Ponting

In the early days of my child labor activities I was an investigator with a camera attachment... but the emphasis became reversed until the camera stole the whole show.

Fundamentally, the camera is nothing more than a light-tight box, having an arrangement for holding a light-sensitive substance (plate or film) and a device (lens or pinhole) for projecting on this sensitive substance an image of objects external to the camera.

Paul Lewis Anderson

The time approaches when men must take their choice between quiescent, immobile faith and ever-advancing Science - faith, with its medieval consolations, Science, which is incessantly scattering its material blessings in the pathway of life, elevating the lot of man in this world, and unifying the human race.

John William Draper

My greatest aim has been to advance the art of photography and to make it what I think I have, a great and truthful medium of history.

The aim and end of the artist is not truth exactly, much less fact; it is effect... There is no doubt he [the photographer] best gets his effect by way of truth, but he uses it as he would a servant, not a master.

Henry Peach Robinson

The purpose of my work was never to destroy but always to create, to construct bridges, because we must live in the hope that humankind will draw together and that the better we understand each other the easier this will become.

For every negative that is a disappointment, there is one that is a joy.

Edward S. Curtis

A photographic portrait needs more collaboration between sitter and artist than a painted portrait.

Alvin Langdon Coburn

Any fool can write a book and most of them are doing it; but it takes brains to build a house.

Charles Fletcher Lummis

Look at the things around you, the immediate world around you. If you are alive, it will mean something to you, and if you care enough about photography, and if you know how to use it, you will want to photograph that meaningness. If you let other people's vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.

One advantage of the discovery of the Photographic Art will be, that it will enable us to introduce into our pictures a multitude of minute details which add to the truth and reality of the representation, but which no artist would take the trouble to faithfully copy from nature.

Henry Fox Talbot