130 Dazzling Photography Quotes About the Art of Capturing the Moment
What makes a good photograph? What are the secrets of the trade? Is a photograph telling the truth or is it just another way of manipulating reality? One can easily argue that photography is the most democratic art of all, especially since the advent of smartphones during the last decades. These famous photography quotes will help us find answers to these questions.
Although it depends on the use of every photograph, the characteristics of a good pic are more or less the same: good lighting, use of colors, composition and framing, exposure and focus, timing, and inspired context. Now that the whole world uses smartphones to take photos, many of the technical problems are solved and issues are taken care of thanks to good lenses and AI features on the devices. However, the question of whether a photograph depicts its subject in a good way remains. Photos need to be interesting, original and convey the photographer’s comment or point of view regarding the moment that was captured.
As being an Instagram influencer has almost become a job title, popular photography has turned its head towards recurring themes. Pleasure, fame, living the moment, discovering the planet or presenting one’s specialization in detail have all become the points of concern for viewers and followers. That said, other subjects – probably less pleasant for the eye – have anything but ceased to exist, but have been left for professional photographers who don’t use social media as their only platform of creation and expression.
Many have brought up the subject of sincerity of the images we often post, especially on social media, of course. Inevitably, photographs seek to fascinate, but making an impression isn’t the only criterion at the time of taking a photo. Being true about depicting what’s real instead of manipulating the result so much that it changes our depiction of reality is also important. Of course, taking a sincere shot doesn’t clash with a good direction, so setting up an impressive photo doesn’t make it fake and should always be considered.
Here we have a collection of quotes to help you ignite your creativity, take your smartphone and head for photographic adventures. The greatest photographers of all time share their views on how to take great shots while top thinkers express their critique toward the medium.
Table of Contents
- Best Photography Quotes To Inspire You To Take Awesome Shots
- Short Photography Quotes For Instagram
- Inspirational Photography Quotes To Motivate Your Passion
- Black and White Photography Quotes
- Nature Photography Quotes
- Famous Quotes About the Impact of Photography
- Insightful and Deep Photography Quotes
- Funny Quotes About Photography
Best Photography Quotes To Inspire You To Take Awesome Shots
Whatever your subject may be, these famous quotes will help you think how to improve your results.
- There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs. Ansel Adams
- Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies. Diane Arbus
- Do not look for signs. Do not look for experiences. Do not be so complicated. Become like a child. See everything with awe. Robert Adams
- Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality. Alfred Stieglitz
- Above all, life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference. Robert Frank
- A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it. Edward Steichen
- I am a professional photographer by trade and an amateur photographer by vocation. Elliot Erwitt
- To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart. Henri Cartier-Bresson
- If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough. Robert Capa
- Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real. Ansel Adams
- Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow. Imogen Cunningham
- I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been. Diane Arbus
- Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation. Henri Cartier Bresson
- For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. Diane Arbus
- It’s not when you press the shutter, but why you press the shutter. Mary Ellen Mark
- The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do. Andy Warhol
- A portrait isn’t a fact but an opinion – an occasion rather than a truth. Richard Avedon
- A photographer must always work with the greatest respect for his subject and in terms of his own point of view. Henri Cartier Bresson
- There is one thing the photograph must contain – the humanity of the moment. Robert Frank
- In a portrait, I’m looking for the silence in somebody. Henri Cartier Bresson
- Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be. Duane Michals
- The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet. Imogen Cunningham
- You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved. Ansel Adams
- While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see. Dorothea Lange
- When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence. Ansel Adams
- If a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it’s as though I’ve neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up. Robert Mapplethorpe
Short Photography Quotes For Instagram
These are the ideal words to use as captions under photos that showcase your photographic skills.
- You don’t take a photograph, you make it. Ansel Adams
- Photography helps people to see. Berenice Abbott
- A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know. Diane Arbus
- I think of photography like therapy. Harry Gruyaert
- I don’t trust words. I trust pictures. Gilles Peress
- The eye should learn to listen before it looks. Robert Frank
- The pictures are there, and you just take them. Robert Capa
- Sharpness is a bourgeois concept. Henri Cartier-Bresson
- A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second. Salman Rushdie
- The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. Susan Sontag
- We don’t take pictures with cameras, we take them with our hearts and minds. Arnold Newman
- A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away. Eudora Welty
- Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second. Marc Riboud
- The camera is a mirror with a memory, but it cannot think. Arnold Newman
- Photography is a love affair with life. Burk Uzzle
- Today everything exists to end in a photograph. Susan Sontag
- Always seeing something, never seeing nothing, being photographer. Walter De Mulder
- Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs. Ansel Adams
- In photography, there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated. August Sander
- Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still. Dorothea Lange
- Everyone takes pictures, so you need to have your own opinion. René Burri
- Patience is the essence of clicking great Photographs! Abhijeet Sawant
- — How do you make your pictures?
— I don’t know, it’s not important.
Henri Cartier-Bresson - I am not a photographer , I am a canon owner! Walaa Walkademagmal
- Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location. Joe McNally
- The photograph… is not a picture of something, but is an object about something. Robert Heinecken
- When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear. Alfred Eisenstaedt
- How do we start taking pictures of people, and stop taking pictures of poses? Justin and Mary Marantz
- The thing that’s fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike. Imogen Cunningham
- We are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us. Ralph Hattersley
- When a silhouette or shape is as beautiful as it is functional and relevant, that’s true luxury. Reed Krakoff
Inspirational Photography Quotes To Motivate Your Passion
What is it that separates a photographer from a great shot? Skills aside, sometimes it’s the realization of the reason why a photograph should be taken.
- Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field. Peter Adams
- A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed. Ansel Adams
- For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity. Henri Cartier-Bresson
- When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice. Robert Frank
- The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words. Elliott Erwitt
- It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us. Henri Cartier-Bresson
- One of the risks of appearing in public is the likelihood of being photographed. Diane Arbus
- The only burden you have ever had is your mind. Robert Adams
- The picture is good or not from the moment it was caught in the camera. Henri Cartier Bresson
- And most of my early pictures failed but about one in a 100 somehow looked better than what I saw. Galen Rowell
- We can write the new chapters in a visual language whose prose and poetry will need no translation. Ernst Haas
- Everybody who does anything for the public can be criticized. There’s always someone who doesn’t like it. Imogen Cunningham
- Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art. Susan Sontag
- What’s left after what one isn’t is taken away is what one is. Diane Arbus
- That frame of mind that you need to make fine pictures of a very wonderful subject, you cannot do it by not being lost yourself. Dorothea Lange
- The best pictures differentiate themselves by nuances…a tiny relationship either a harmony or a disharmony that creates a picture. Ernst Haas
- The camera’s not a camera, really. It’s an open door we need to walk through. It’s up to us to keep moving our feet. Joe McNally
- With photography, you zero in; you put a lot of energy into short moments, and then you go on to the next thing. Robert Mapplethorpe
- Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself. Berenice Abbott
- When burdened by the feeling that there are too many photographs in the world, I ask myself if there are too many flowers. Alec Soth
- A good portrait ought to tell something of the subject’s past and suggest something of his future. Bill Brandt
- Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph. Matt Hardy
- It’s important to take bad pictures. It’s the bad ones that have to do with what you’ve never done before. They can make you recognize something you hadn’t seen in a way that will make you recognize it when you see it again. Diane Arbus
- 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
- I was poor. When you’re poor you work, and when you’re rich you expect somebody to hand it to you. So I think being reasonably poor is very good for people. Imogen Cunningham
- One thing that struck me early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in. Diane Arbus
- To photograph is to hold one’s breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy. Henri Cartier-Bresson
- Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. Henri Cartier-Bresson
- Millions of men have lived to fight, build palaces and boundaries, shape destinies and societies; but the compelling force of all times has been the force of originality and creation profoundly affecting the roots of human spirit. Ansel Adams
Black and White Photography Quotes
Not everything has been depicted in color – and that, too, has its rules and its evident or hidden beauty.
- 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
- To the complaint, ‘There are no people in these photographs,’ I respond, There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer. Ansel Adams
- I lived and grew up in the black and white period of photojournalism. René Burri
- Media today is even more black and white, then early photography ever was. Loesje
- 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
- When I take a black-and-white portrait, it’s not particularly meant to please you. It’s meant to talk to you; it’s meant to shame you. It’s meant to scream out at you, and it has a message. Don McCullin
Nature Photography Quotes
These famous quotes about shooting the natural environment will surely inspire you.
- The Earth is art, the photographer is only a witness. Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Earth from Above
- Sometimes I arrive just when God’s ready to have somone click the shutter. Ansel Adams
- Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer – and often the supreme disappointment. Ansel Adams
- Look deep into nature and then you will understand everything better. Albert Einstein
- We mountaineers always live with the feeling that we came on the scene too late. Galen Rowell
- I think landscape photography, in general, is somewhat undervalued. Galen Rowell
- I find it some of the hardest photography and the most challenging photography I’ve ever done. It’s a real challenge to work with the natural features and the natural light. Galen Rowell
- I almost never set out to photograph a landscape, nor do I think of my camera as a means of recording a mountain or an animal unless I absolutely need a ‘record shot’. My first thought is always of light. Galen Rowell
- You only get one sunrise and one sunset a day, and you only get so many days on the planet. A good photographer does the math and doesn’t waste either. Galen Rowell
Famous Quotes About the Impact of Photography
Photographers and other artists had something unexpected to say about photography.
- A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people. Annie Leibovitz
- A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth. Richard Avedon
- A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you. Brigitte Bardot
- The negative is the equivalent of the composer’s score and the print the performance. Ansel Adams
- A photograph is usually looked at- seldom looked into. Ansel Adams
- It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer. Dorothea Lange
- We all perform. It’s what we do for each other all the time, deliberately or unintionally. It’s a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognized as what we’d like to be – PERFORMANCE! Richard Avedon
- Picture yourself on a surfboard. Once you find your balance, loosen your grip. Breathe. Accept that no matter how good you think you are, you will fall. Again and again. We take pictures not only to see, but to be seen; not only to remember, but to be remembered. But when you are surfing, it’s best to forget about the people on the beach. Alec Soth, A Pound of Pictures
- Look at us through the lens of a camera / Does it remove all of our pain? Editors, Camera
Insightful and Deep Photography Quotes
Pondering about all the aspects of the photographic process – as well as reading these profound quotes – can lead to better ideas of shots.
- I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost. Nan Goldin
- All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. Susan Sontag
- There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit. William S. Burroughs
- Perhaps the desire to take photographs arises from the observation that on the broadest view, from the standpoint of reason, the world is a great disappointment. In its details, however, and caught by surprise, the world always has a stunning clarity. Jean Baudrillard
- To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder – a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time. Susan Sontag, On Photography
- 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
- Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. ‘The necessary condition for an image is sight,’Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: ‘We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
- Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Susan Sontag, On Photography
- When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not ’emerge’, do not ‘leave’: they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies. Roland Barthes
- We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman. Ludwig Wittgenstein
- You only have to start saying of something: ‘Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!’ and you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it never existed, and therefore in order to really live you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves
Funny Quotes About Photography
Humor has often a lot to say about the serious side of things – photography included!
- The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera. Dorothea Lange
- Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst. Henri Cartier Bresson
- There are no bad pictures; that’s just how your face looks sometimes. Abraham Lincoln
- It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter. Alfred Eisenstaedt
- There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept. Ansel Adams
- I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers. Mahatma Gandhi
- A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity. George Bernard Shaw
- To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk. Edward Weston
- One of these days, I’m going to publish a book of all the pictures I did not take. It is going to be a huge hit. René Burri
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