Photography is more than just skill or talent, it’s a passion which needs constant fulfillment. Some photographers keep up their spirits by finding a quote that they connect with. Then, on a day when they’re struggling, they look at that quote and rediscover their passion. Whether you are an amateur or a professional photographer, these inspirational photography quotes would motivate you to find your passion and love for photography.
Learn from and get inspired by these photography quotes from some famous photographers such as Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ted Grant, Annie Leibovitz among many others.
Here is a list of 90 inspirational photography quotes that will hopefully inspire you to work harder and become the photographer you’ve always wanted to be. Enjoy these words of wisdom;
1. “Photography is the story I fail to put into words.”
Destin Sparks
2. The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.”
Elliott Erwitt
3. When a photo of a person looks deep into your spirit and tells you a thousand stories….. Stories from your past even before you existed, then the photo is way above any description.”
Sameh Elsayed
4. A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they’ll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won’t do a thing for you if you don’t have anything in your head or in your heart.”
Arnold Newman
5. I don’t think there’s any such thing as teaching people photography, other than influencing them a little. People have to be their own learners. They have to have a certain talent.”
Imogen Cunningham
6. Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.”
Paul Strand
7. You know, I really don’t think you learn from teachers. You learn from work. I think what you learn, really, is how to be- you have to be your own toughest critic, and you only learn that from work, from seeing work.”
Garry Winogrand
8. For me, documentary photography has always come with great responsibility. Not just to tell the story honestly and with empathy, but also to make sure the right people hear it. When you photograph somebody who is in pain or discomfort, they trust you to make sure the images will act as their advocate.”
Giles Duley
9. When I make a photograph I feel that I hold a piece of the universe in my hands.”
Paul Chaplo
10. Skill in Photography is acquired by practice and not by purchase
Percy W. Harris
11. The two most engaging powers of a photograph are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.”
William Thackeray
12. I don’t think there’s any such thing as teaching people photography, other than influencing them a little. People have to be their own learners. They have to have a certain talent.”
– Imogen Cunningham
13. 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 extraordinary.”
David Bailey
15. A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective.”
Irving Penn
14. My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.”
Helmut Newton
16. There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.”
Ernst Haas
17. The photographer does the world a great disservice when he leaves his camera at home.”
Mark Denman
18. Life is like photography. You develop from the negative –
Ziad K. Abdelnour
19. When you photograph a face…you photograph the soul behind it.”
Jean-Luc Godard
20. Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real.”
Ansel Adams
21. You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.”
Joan Miro
22. To me, it is better to ‘guess’ at how something works, experiment, fail, guess again, fail, and keep repeating that process over and over again until you either figure it out or you discover a multiplicity of other cool tricks along the way.”
Trey Ratcliff
23. There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching.”
Sontag, Susan
24. If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera.”
Lewis Hine
25. Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.”
Imogen Cunningham
26. The important thing is, you have to have something important to say about the world.”
Paul Strand
27. Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.”
Matt Hardy
28. Life is like a camera. Just focus on what’s important and capture the good times, develop from the negatives and if things don’t work out, just take another shot.”
Unknown
29. What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.”
Karl Lagerfeld
30. One advantage of photography is that it’s visual and can transcend language.”
Lisa Kristine
31. Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.”
Peter Adams
32. There’s a time when people say your work is revolutionary, but you have to keep being revolutionary. I can’t keep shooting pop stars all my life. You have to keep changing, keep pushing yourself, looking for the new, the unusual.”
Rankin
33. “My best photo will be the last one, that I want to be taken.”
Biju Karakkonam
34. Whosoever possesses a camera should never know boredom.”
Wayne Gerard Trotman
35. 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
36. Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.”
Joe McNally
37. Photography is not about cameras, gadgets and gizmos. Photography is about photographers. A camera didn’t make a great picture any more than a typewriter wrote a great novel.”
Peter Adams
38. I like to photograph anyone before they know what their best angles are.”
Ellen Von Unwerth
39. The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.”
Andy Warhol
40. I take the same picture twice, First with my heart then camera.”
Biju Karakkonam
41. Do not take pictures to please the public, the photo should be spontaneous and free”
Betty Poluk
42. The more you photograph, the more you realize what can and what can’t be photographed. You just have to keep doing it.”
Eliot Porter
43. Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure.”
Tony Benn
44. As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs.”
Sam Abell
45. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”
Susan Sontag
46. I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.”
Diane Arbus
47.Some days you just get lucky… Other days you wait patiently for luck to happen”
Destin Sparks
49. “When the world asks “what was it like?” Only the photographer can say “See!”
Mark Denman
48. “God creates the beauty. My camera and I are a witness.”
Mark Denman
50. Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.
David Alan Harvey
Wayne Miller
51. “I think good dreaming is what leads to good photographs.”
52. “What I have learnt and what I teach now is all about experimentation and learning to pick yourself up and try again when you fall down.”
Lara Jade
53. “In my view, you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it.”
Émile Zola
54. “The eye should learn to listen before it looks.”
Robert Frank
55. “My pictures are about making people realize we’ve got to protect those who can’t speak for themselves.”
Michael “Nick” Nichols
56. A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.”
Annie Leibovitz
57. “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
58. “Taking a picture is like giving a piece of your soul away. You allow other people to see the world through your eyes.”
Katja Michael
59. “No matter how sophisticated the camera, the photographer is still the one that makes it.”
Doug Bartlow
60. “Photography to me is catching a moment which is passing, and which is true.”
Jacques-Henri Lartigue
61. “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”
Dorothea Lange
62. “The best images are the ones that retain their strength and impact over the years, regardless of the number of times they are viewed.”
Anne Geddes
63. “Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.”
Yousuf Karsh
64. “Regarding the creative: never assume you’re the master, only the student. Your audience will determine if you’re masterful.”
Don Roff
65. “Every viewer is going to get a different thing. That’s the thing about painting, photography, cinema.”
66. There are no bad pictures; that’s just how your face looks sometimes.”
David Lynch Wayne Miller Abraham Lincoln
67. “It’s weird that photographers spend years or even a whole lifetime, trying to capture moments that added together, don’t even amount to a couple of hours.”
James Lalropui Keivom
68. “There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.”
Ansel Adams
69. “Once photography enters your bloodstream, it is like a disease.”
Anonymous
70. “What can be proved by a photograph, can never be by a word.”
T.A
72. “My love of photography is melded with the ability to capture what I want to remember in the moment I want to never forget.”
Devin Dygert
71. “The cliché comes not in what you shoot but in how you shoot it.”
David duChemin
73. Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.
Don McCullin
74. “In the world of photography, you get to share a captured moment with other people.”
James Wilson
75. “Photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future.”
Sally Mann
76. “Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography.”
George Eastman
77. “Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work.”
Martin Parr
78. “When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their souls!”
Ted Grant
79. “The whole nature of photography has changed with the advent of a camera in everybody’s hand.”
– Sally Mann
80. “Black and white are the colors of photography. To me they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected.”
Robert Frank
81. “Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.”
Arnold Newman
82. “Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask ‘how’, while others of a more curious nature will ask ‘why’. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.”
Man Ray
83. “Technology has eliminated the basement darkroom and the whole notion of photography as an intense labour of love for obsessives and replaced them with a sense of immediacy and instant gratification.”
Joe McNally
84. Only photograph what you love.”
Tim Walker
85. “The advent of the digital age and the immediacy and convenience of digital video and photography allows people to become an integral part of the feedback loop which actively shapes the content we are fed.”
Damian Loeb
86. “In terms of digital photography, I continue to print and use film for the most part. I still shoot with film, 21/4 film specifically, and I love it. I love it because I know what it does, how it really responds to light.”
Carrie Mae Weems
87. “Photography helps people to see.”
Berenice Abbott
88. Photography is a love affair with life.
Burk Uzzle
89. There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.”
Ansel Adams
90. A camera is a SAVE button for the mind’s eye.”
Roger Kingston
Which are your favorite photography quotes? Which one of the famous photographers have inspired you with their photo quotes?
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1 Comment
Patience Agaba
November 22, 2019 at 6:18 pmThese are very beautiful quotes. Everyone of them has an instruction on how to do better as a photographer