Photographer Quotes

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

Edward S. Curtis

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.

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

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

After viewing a few paintings and a drawing that I had brought in the day before yesterday, Mr.v.d.Kellen [Dutch art dealer] assured me that there was absolutely no chance of placing anything of mine here, unless it was bought under pressure of a pleasant future, and I think he is right because he showed me various paintings, and specifically those that were closest to my understanding of art were the most difficult to place......I was astounded and furious about such far-reaching stupidity and the pedantery of the man [another art dealer, Herman Deichmann]. All the paintings present were beneath criticism, they were just the usual German Academic stuff.

George Hendrik Breitner

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.

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.

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.

Is she as pretty as a picture
Or clear as crystal
Or pure as a lily
Or black as coal
Or sharp as a razor?

I wanted to make photographs that were immediate and revealing - different from traditional portraiture that called for formal distance between artist and subject.

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.

It was clear, I was not Manet's type. Picasso—who had a way with women—only used me & Duchamp never even considered me.

Carrie Mae Weems

Reporters listen, photographers look. If you are doing your job seriously as a photojournalist, your sight must be the primary sense that you use at all times.

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...