Photographer Quotes

We perceive and interpret the outer world through a set of incredibly fine internal receptors. But we are incapable, by ourselves, of grasping or tweezing out any permanent, sharable figment of it. Practically speaking, we ritually verify what is there, and are disposed to call it reality. But, with photographs, we have concrete proof that we have not been hallucinating all our lives.

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

Jerome Liebling

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

I have always tried to keep truth in my photographs. My work, whether realistic or abstract, has always dealt with a form of religion or imagination.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Emotion may be expressed, or the utter lack of it may be expressed, but the only important fact is that of expression.

William Mortensen

I think one of the shortcomings of reality, of real experience, is most people's inability to examine something carefully and thoughtfully without moving around or being distracted by something else. What photography does really is it forces you to examine something you normally wouldn't.

We cannot hope to control what we do not understand, nor to confront our adversary, war, with our eyes averted.

Where you point the camera is the question and the picture you get is the answer to decipher.

Robert Polidori

I'd like to briefly state the accomplishment that we expect from a photographer. He must make the person being photographed forget that he has eaten from the tree of knowledge.

Albert Renger-Patzsch

I have these obsessions that I do not completely understand, with the deep mark, with the ruptured surface, with scars and traces, traces that human beings are leaving on the earth. It is not a comment on the environment... it is metaphysical.

Sophie Ristelhueber

Most of my photographs were taken on the spur of the moment, very quickly, just as they occurred. All attention focuses on the specific instant, almost too good to be true, which can only vanish in the following one.

Obsession and repetition in the process of making things is one constant element in my work.

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

Children are the true believers, and some of us are lucky enough to make the transition to adulthoood without ever losing the ability to see through young eyes.

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

There's an arc of being. There's a beginning, then the peak is reached and then there's the end. It's like the pole vaulter who begins his run, shoots up, then comes down. At the peak there is no movement. He's neither going up nor going down. It is that moment I wait for.

We are Africans not because we are born in Africa, but because Africa is born in us.

Chester Higgins, Jr.

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

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?

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

If we were to go to the sun, and to bring away some portions of it and analyze them in our laboratories, we could not examine them more accurately than we can by this new mode of spectrum analysis..

Warren De la Rue

Infinitesimal is the nearest to zero infinitesimal is so small that it is no longer something but it is not yet nothing.

Nature's children do not reveal their intimate ways to the bustling, human noise-maker, and he who would seek to know something of their interesting daily doings must first of all acquire the faculty to observe whilst remaining unobserved, and hear without being heard.

Empty empty empty
so many empty chairs
everywhere. They look
charming in van Gogh's paintings.

Liu Xia (intellectual)

Writers have written eloquently of the joys of walking, but the magic of walking is something more than pleasure. It is a true magic, a psychophysical alchemy, which transforms the body and the mind.