Quotes by Women Photographers

Leni Riefenstahl

Julia Margaret Cameron

Nan Goldin

Diane Arbus

Annie Leibovitz

Berenice Abbott

Tina Modotti

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

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

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

You know, a documentary is only interesting once in a while. If you look at a whole book of Dorothea [Lange]'s where she has row after row of people bending over and digging out carrots - that can be very tedious. And so it's only once in a while that something happens that is worth doing.

Imogen Cunningham

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?

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

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

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

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

Deborah Copaken

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

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.

For me, the importance of photography is that you can point to something, that you can let other people see things. Ultimately, it is a matter of the specialness of the ordinary.

Rineke Dijkstra

The older I get, the one thing I can trust in myself more than anything else is the way I feel about something. When I photograph I try to be as aware of my feelings as I can be to somehow try and get them out of me and onto the film in terms of the way I am responding or seeing the world.

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.

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

Liu Xia (intellectual)

It would be mistaken to suppose that any of the best photography is come at by intellection; it is like all art, essentially the result of an intuitive process, drawing on all that the artist is rather than on anything he thinks, far less theorizes about.

All the technique you can learn - and you should learn everything you can - you should have it here in the fingers not here in the head - and then you forget about it.

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

It is easier for me to take ten good pictures in an airplane bathroom than in the gardens at Versailles.

If anyone gets in my way when I am making a picture, I become irrational. I'm never sure what I am going to do, or sometimes even aware of what I do — only that I want that picture.

Margaret Bourke-White

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

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

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.