American Photographer Quotes

Man Ray

Leonard Nimoy

Ansel Adams

Robert Capa

Robert Mapplethorpe

Moby

Edward Steichen

When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I'd like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.

Annie Leibovitz

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

On his 1985 book, In The American West

One of the ongoing themes in my work, I hope, and one of the things I believe in, is a sense of human nature, a sense of shared humanity above the cultural layers we place on ourselves [which don't] mean that much compared to the human experience.

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

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

Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.

The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes the past.

Berenice Abbott

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

Charles Fletcher Lummis

In a world of disturbing images, the general body of photography is bland, dealing complacently with nature and treating our preconceptions as insights. Strange, private worlds rarely slip past our guard...

Henry Holmes Smith

I didn't want to make 'high' art, I had no interest in using paint, I wanted to find something that anyone could relate to without knowing about contemporary art. I wasn't thinking in terms of precious prints or archival quality; I didn't want the work to seem like a commodity.

You just do what you love, and then a style happens later on.

David LaChapelle

I believe in goodness
Mercy and charity
I believe in a universal spirit
I believe in casting bread
Upon the waters

I wanted to change history and preserve humanity. But in the process I changed myself and preserved my own.

The business of the state trying to legislate modesty is relatively both an infantile and ridiculous procedure. Of course, it is true that the more things are secreted the more intriguing they become, because it is always the forbidden that has the strongest appeal. Nudity is a state of fact - lewdity a state of mind.

Paul Outerbridge

My sympathies have always been with the everyday people... the center of my photography.

Jerome Liebling

People who hate what I make hate me, too. They must think I am a demon or some kind of evil sorcerer. Those who understand what I do appreciate the determination, love, and courage it takes to find wonder and beauty in people who are considered by society to be damaged, unclean, dysfunctional, or wretched.

Joel-Peter Witkin

In Egypt: Under no conditions, under threat of death could anyone kill a cat. People were exceuted for even killing a cat accidentally. And when a cat died, the whole family, and probably their closest friends, went into mourning, the measure of their personal loss signalled by their shaving off their eyebrows.

I was brought in, not in the photographic department at all, I was brought in on a thing called Special Skills. I was to do posters, pamphlets, murals, propaganda in general, you know.

Happiness is a sort of perfume. You can't pour it on somebody else without getting a few drops on yourself.

James Van Der Zee

I would die if I had to be confined. I don't want to feel that I'm missing out on experiencing as much as I can. For me, experiencing is knowing people all over the world and being able to photograph.

Mary Ellen Mark

In my work, the information is the least important part. It's there, and the work wouldn't mean the same thing without it, but it isn't structured around the information. The most interesting part to me is the visual play... looking at this little universe of representation that I can make out of the world.

The star system has us making pictures with personalities rather than stories, sacrificing everything in order to keep some old bags playing young women.

I know that I am one with beauty and that my comrades are one. Let our souls be mountains, Let our spirits be stars, Let our hearts be worlds.

You will, in time, see and show others not just the superficial, but the details, the meanings, and the implications of all that you look at...

The gear you can't afford is not the barrier keeping you from success. Gear has very little to do with photography.