I’ve always been a big fan of quotes. They can be inspiring, thought-provoking, influential or just plain interesting. Here’s a personal list of 50 of my favorite quotes for Street Photography, and Photography in general.
- “The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.”
-Robert Doisneau - “Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.”
-Ansel Adams - “A photographer is an acrobat treading the high wire of chance, trying to capture shooting stars.”
-Guy Le Querrec - “Don’t wait. The time will never be just right.”
-Napoleon Hill - “I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.”
-Diane Arbus - “My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.”
-Steve McCurry - “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.”
-Robert Capa
Portland, Oregon - “Emotion or feeling is really the only thing about pictures I find interesting. Beyond that is is just a trick.”
-Christopher Anderson - “Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.”
-George Addair - “The photograph is completely abstracted from life, yet it looks like life. That is what has always excited me about photography.”
-Richard Kalvar - “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”
-Mark Twain - “I think good dreaming is what leads to good photographs.”
-Wayne Miller - “I fell in love with the process of taking pictures, with wandering around finding things. To me it feels like a kind of performance. The picture is a document of that performance.”
-Alec Soth - “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”
-Ansel Adams - “Everything that is visible hides something that is invisible.”
–Renee Magritte - “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.”
-Garry Winogrand
Miami, Florida - “The photograph should be more interesting or more beautiful than what was photographed.”
-Garry Winogrand - “Obsessed is just a word the lazy use to describe the dedicated.”
-Russell Warren - “Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.”
-Ansel Adams - “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”
-Oscar Wilde - “A photograph is the pause button on life.”
-Ty Holland - “No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.”
-Oscar Wilde - “You fill up the frame with feelings, energy, discovery, and risk, and leave room enough for someone else to get in there.”
-Joel Meyerowitz - “The best dreams happen when you’re awake.”
-Cherie Gilderbloom - “All the technique in the world doesn’t compensate for the inability to notice.”
-Elliott Erwitt - “It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.”
-Alfred Eisenstaedt
Varanasi, India - “Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.”
-Cyril Connolly - “Which of my photographs is my favourite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.”
-Imogen Cunningham - “Anyone can shoot chaos. But the most perceptive photographers can make compelling pictures out of uninteresting moments.”
-Alex Tehrani - “Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.”
-Mark Twain - “Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.”
-Henri Cartier-Bresson - “Seeing is not enough; you have to feel what you photograph.”
-Andre Kertesz - “The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don’t belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation.”
-Susan Meiselas - “I have the great privilege of being both witness and storyteller. Intimacy, trust and intuition guide my work.”
-Jim Goldberg - “I am forever chasing light. Light turns the ordinary into the magical.”
-Trent Parke - “Photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world.”
-Bruno Barbey
Tokyo, Japan - “Photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the photo as a judgment that the photograph is good.”
-Garry Winogrand - “If you seek authenticity for authenticity’s sake you are no longer authentic.”
-Jean Paul Sartre - “Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way… An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”
-Charles Bukowski - “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”
– Diane Arbus - “A photograph has picked up a fact of life, and that fact will live forever.”
-Raghu Rai - “The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things in words.”
-Elliott Erwitt - “It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary.”
-David Bailey - “Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn’t look like somebody else’s work.”
-William Klein - “The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”
-Oscar Wilde
Tokyo, Japan - “Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.”
-Edward Steichen - “Ultimately photography is about who you are. It’s the truth in relation to yourself. And seeking truth becomes a habit.”
-Leonard Freed - “Since I’m inarticulate, I express myself with images.”
-Helen Levitt - “To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”
-Elliott Erwitt - “When people ask me what equipment I use – I tell them my eyes.”
-Anonymous
What are some your favorite quotes related to photography? Share them in the comments below!
What superb quotes and what a superb website! I was actually watching, “The Many Lives of William Klein” and went looking for his wiki which in turn lead me here. By the way, all good quotes on this page especially number 40 by Diane Arbus. By the way, have you seen Klein’s, “Broadway by Light”?