20th-century Photographer Quotes

Everywhere I look and most of the time I look, I see photographs.

White is the color of decomposition. White is also no color. White is nothing. In photography, the paper is white, next comes the light, which is also white, then the shadow is created, the apparition.

Sure. I'd like to live regular. Go home to a good looking wife, a hot dinner, and a husky kid. But I guess I got film in my blood. I love this racket. It's exciting. It's dangerous. It's funny. It's tough. It's heartbreaking.

I want to take retirement rather than feel as if it's taking me unawares. Maybe even seize it joyously. But at least behold it without looking back so longingly that I turn into a pillar of regret.

What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see. Perception, belief, action, and change are codependent.

John Paul Caponigro

We are Afropolitans: not citizens, but Africans of the world.

One could think of a person who seems to have two opposing and contradictory sides to his personality; but it turns out that in the end the two sides are complementary. The same happens with an artist's work: deep down, what appear as contradictory sides are merely different registers, different aspects of the reality that the artist inhabits

Manuel Álvarez Bravo

Stories are one of the greatest gifts we can give to our children. Stories are equipment for life.

Matthew Knisely

The mountains are beautiful but they are not worth dying for.

I loved to press the shutter, to freeze time, to turn little slices of life into rectangle rife with metaphor.

Deborah Copaken

Style as a concept has been hijacked to mean elite, refined and expensive when it should be thought of as a basic expression of life in much the same way as we all identify with music or speech.

It had never once occurred to me that the paper I wanted to work for would not want me. Certainly I never expected to be rejected solely because I was a girl!

Kathryn Tucker Windham

I feel that whatever picture an artist makes it is in part a picture of himself - a matter of identity.

I do not photograph for ulterior purposes. I photograph for the thing itself - for the photograph - without consideration of how it may be used.

The true art of being young is knowing how to defy gravity and upset as many people as possible while doing it. How to penetrate the great secrets of the universe and damn the torpedoes. How to stir the demons of our destiny...

Subject matter comes to you, you don't go to it... Although I shoot extemporaneously a lot of the time, I prefer to have half a dozen shots in my mind. Probably I have seen them many times under different conditions and I have been thinking about them. The moment shall come when I shall go back to them and make the photographs.

Working myself into a position of total versatility, so that I can do anything I want to do at the time I want to do it. Whether I do it or not is another question.

I cannot solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art.

The world is infinitely more interesting than any of my opinions about it.

Neither camera, nor lens, nor film determine the quality of pictures; it is the visual perception of the man behind the mechanism which brings them to life. Art contains the allied ideas of making and begetting, of being master of one's craft and able to create. Without these properties no art exists and no photographic art can come into being

Helmut Gernsheim

Dissatisfaction with one's self and dissatisfaction with the world - is necessary - it is one of the prime things that keeps the artist going on - that drives him - happiness, as such, must come in between times, as best it can.

Clarence John Laughlin

I think I was shy as a young woman and realized that photography was an ideal way of expressing myself, of telling people what was going on without having to talk.

Is it not the artist who - like our dreams - dissolves the pretenses that hide us from ourselves, disclosing both our self-serving fantasies and our unsuspected potentialities?

Our conviction that we are free to choose what we make of a photograph hides the complicity to which we are recruited in the very act of looking.

I often wondered why I was attracted to certain landscapes and not others and why my photographs (and depictions by other artists) looked the way they did, Archetypes imprinted on my mind started me on a search...