450+ Famous Inspirational & Powerful Photography Quotes

450+ Famous Inspirational & Powerful Photography Quotes

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Photography is more than capturing images—it’s capturing emotions, stories, and moments that last forever. Sometimes, a few powerful words can inspire photographers just as much as a stunning photo. That’s why we’ve gathered 450+ famous, inspirational, and powerful photography quotes to spark your creativity, fuel your passion, and remind you why you fell in love with photography. Whether you’re a professional, an aspiring artist, or simply love taking pictures, these timeless quotes will motivate you to see the world through a fresh lens and create with deeper meaning.

“Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.” – Peter Adams

“I don’t trust words. I trust pictures.” – Gilles Peress

“Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.” – Dorothea Lange

“Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.” – Marc Riboud

“The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.” – Andy Warhol

“What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.” – Karl Lagerfeld

“When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear.” – Alfred Eisenstaedt

“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”– Ansel Adams

“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

“Black and white photography erases time from the equation.” — Jason Peterson

“Color is descriptive. Black and white is interpretive.” — Elliott Erwitt

“I think it’s because it was an emotional story, and emotions come through much stronger in black and white. Color is distracting in a way, it pleases the eye but it doesn’t necessarily reach the heart.” — Kim Hunter

“The most colorful thing in the world is black and white, it contains all colors and at the same time excludes all.” — Vikrmn

“The special factor about black and white photography is that it doesn’t just copy the reality, but it represents it with its own language.” — Gian Marco Marano

“To see in color is a delight for the eye but to see in black and white is a delight for the soul.” — Andri Cauldwell

“What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality.” — Ruth Bernhard

“With black and white photography, what you have to say counts more than the way you say it.” — Gian Marco Marano

“Color is everything, black and white is more.” — Dominic Rouse

“There’s something strange and powerful about black and white imagery.” — Stefan Kanfer

“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

“Be kind to your photographer because the power of editing is in their hands.” – Anonymous

“Cheap photography isn’t good, my dear, and good photography isn’t cheap.”– Someecards

“Everyone has a photographic memory. Some don’t have film.” – Stephen Wright

“People say photographs don’t lie, mine do.”– David LaChapelle

“The quickest way to make money at photography is to sell your camera.”– Anonymous

“There are no bad pictures; that’s just how your face looks sometimes.” – Abraham Lincoln

“Why yes, I’d love to take your photos for free. That’s exactly why I spent thousands of dollars on all this equipment.” – Someecards

“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!” – John Muir

“I wish that all of nature’s magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed.” – Annie Leibovitz

“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

“Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.” – Ambrose Bierce

“The earth is art, the photographer is only a witness.” – Yann Arthus-Bertrand

“Wherever there is light, one can photograph.” – Alfred Stieglitz

“It all ultimately comes down to showing respect to nature and understanding the species you want to photograph.” – Riddhi Mukherjee

“Wildlife photography …combines knowledge of natural history, biodiversity, development, man-animal conflict, conservation policies, and so on.” — Percy Fernandez

“Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.” – Joe McNally

“In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.” — Alfred Stieglitz

“Photography has no rules, it is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it is achieved.” – Bill Brandt

“Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever… It remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.” — Aaron Siskind

“Taking an image, freezing a moment, reveals how rich reality truly is.” — Anonymous

“The camera makes you forget you’re there. It’s not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much.” – Annie Leibovitz

“The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?” – Edward Weston

“There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.” — Robert Frank

“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

“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

“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson

“Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real.” – Ansel Adams

“Photography is the story I fail to put into words.”– Destin Sparks

“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.” – Ansel Adams

“When I photograph I make love.” – Alfred Stieglitz

“The negative is the equivalent of the composer’s score and the print the performance.” – Ansel Adams

“There is one thing the photo must contain – the humanity of the moment.” – Robert Frank

“If you are out there shooting, things will happen for you. If you’re not out there, you’ll only hear about it.” – Jay Maisel

“Photography is the art of making memories tangible.” – Destin Sparks

“A good snapshot keeps a moment that s gone from running away.” – Eudora Welty

“Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.” – Duane Michals

“ 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

“It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera… they are made with the eye, heart, and head.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson

“A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.”— Edward Steichen

“It’s one thing to make a picture of what a person looks like, it’s another thing to make a portrait of who they are.” – Paul Caponigro

“Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.” – Diane Arbus

“A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.” – Annie Leibovitz

I go and get the camera and do it. Photography is a medium in which if you don’t do it then, very often you don’t do it at all, because it doesn’t happen twice.” – Paul Strand

“The photo that you took with your camera is the imagination you want to create with reality.” – Scott Lorenzo

“In the world of photography, you get to share a captured moment with other people.” – James Wilson

“Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.” – Paul Strand

“If the photographer is interested in the people in front of his lens, and if he is compassionate, it’s already a lot. The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.” – Eve Arnold

“Photographers stop photographing subjects too soon before they have exhausted the possibilities.” – Dorothea Lange

“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.” – Susan Sontag

“It is my intention to present – through the medium of photography – intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators.” – Ansel Adams

“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” – Dorothea Lange

“Actually, I’m not all that interested in the subject of photography. Once the photo is in the box, I’m not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren’t cooks.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson

“In my mind, I visualize how a particular… sight will appear on a print. If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice.” – Ansel Adams

“Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.” – Marc Riboud

“Once you learn to care, you can record images with your mind or on film. There is no difference between the two.” – Anon

“My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, or the camera’s eye may entirely change my idea.” – Edward Weston

“Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.” – Jean-Luc Godard

“If you see something that moves you, and then snap it, you keep a moment.” – Linda McCartney

“To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson

“There are always two people in every photo: the photographer and the viewer.” – Ansel Adams

“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” – Diane Arbus

“Always shoot from the shadow side.” – Ted Grant

“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

“The artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.” – Paul Strand

“God creates the beauty. My camera and I are a witness.” – Mark Denman

“Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson

“Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.” – Matt Hardy

“If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera.” – Lewis Hine

“Photography has been my way of bearing witness to the joy I find in seeing the extraordinary in ordinary.” –Harold Feinstein

“The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.” – Orson Welles

“I never have taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse.” – Diane Arbus

“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place…” – Eliott Erwitt

“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” – Susan Sontag

“The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.” – Steven Pinker

“It’s amazing how photography can capture just a split second of something exquisite.” – Kiera Cass

“I love the people I photograph. I mean, they’re my friends. I’ve never met most of them or I don’t know them at all, yet through the image, I live with them.” – Bruce Gilden

“Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work.” – Martin Parr

“In photography, there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.” – August Sander

“One advantage of photography is that it’s visual and can transcend language.” – Lisa Kristine

“My camera is my passport.” – Steve McCurry

”Photography, to me, is catching a moment which is passing, and which is true.” – Jacques-Henri Lartigue

“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

“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

“It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.” – Alfred Eisenstaedt

“I like to photograph others before they know what their best angles are.” – Ellen Von Unwerth

“We are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us.” – Ralph Hattersley

“Photography is an itch that won’t go away. No matter how much you scratch it.” – Dara McGrath

“Photography is the recording of strangeness and beauty with beguiling precision.” – Sebastian Smee

“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.” – Anon

“Only photograph what you love.” – Tim Walker

“The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.” – Ernst Hass

“When I photograph, what I’m really doing is seeking answers to things.” – Wynn Bullock

“Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.” – Dorothea Lange

“When the world asks, “what was it like?” Only the photographers can say, “See!” – Mark Denman

“Once photography enters your bloodstream, it is like a disease.” – Anon

“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

“I didn’t choose photography, photography chose me.” – Gerardo Suter

“With photography, a new language has been created. Now, for the first time, it is possible to express reality by reality. We can look at an impression as long as we wish, we can delve into it and, so to speak, renew past experiences at will.” – Ernst Haas

“Photography is a means by which we learn to see the ordinary.” – David Bailey

“Kodak sells film, but they don’t advertise film; they advertise memories.” – Theodore Levitt

“A photograph is like a recipe – the memory is the finished dish.” – Carrie Latet

“Contrast is what makes photography interesting.” – Conrad Hall

“Every artist has a central story to tell, and the difficulty, the impossible task, is trying to present that story in pictures” – Gregory Crewdson

“I have always been fascinated by the poetic condition of twilight. By its transformative quality. Its power of turning the ordinary into something magical and otherworldly.” – Gregory Crewdson

“Skill in photography is acquired by practice, and not by purchase.” – Percy W. Harris

“You photograph with all your ideology.” – Sebastiao Salgado

“Your inspiration is better if it comes from many different sources and your sensibilities will transform all those influences and inspiration into your own visual world. It’s like reading the book instead of watching the movie.” – Peter Lindbergh

“The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet.” – Imogen Cunningham

“We see in colour all the time. Black and white is therefore immediately an interpretation of the world, rather than a copy.” – Michael Kenna

“The golden rule in the arts, as far as I am concerned, is that all rules are meant to be broken.” –Michael Kenna

“If I have any ‘message’ worth giving to a beginner it is that there are no shortcuts in photography.” – Edward Weston

“After following the crowd for a while, I’d then go 180 degrees in the exact opposite direction. It always worked for me.” – Elliott Erwitt

“To me, photography must suggest, not insist or explain.” – Brassai

“Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.” — Ambrose Bierce

“One advantage of photography is that it’s visual and can transcend language.” — Lisa Kristine

“A photograph is like a recipe — the memory is the finished dish.” — Carrie Latet

“The Earth is art, the photographer is only a witness.” — Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Earth from Above

“God creates the beauty. My camera and I are a witness.” — Mark Denman

“A camera is a SAVE button for the mind’s eye.” — Roger Kingston

“Taking an image, freezing a moment, reveals how rich reality truly is.” — Anonymous

“Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.” — David Alan Harvey

“If you see something that moves you, and then snap it, you keep a moment.” — Linda McCartney

“In the world of photography, you get to share a captured moment with other people.” — James Wilson

“A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.” — E. Welty

“My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.” — Steve McCurry

“We are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us.” — Ralph Hattersley

“Essentially what photography is is life lit up.” — Sam Abell

“Photography is the story I fail to put into words.” — Destin Sparks

“Photography is a love affair with life.” — Burk Uzzle

“Memories are timeless treasures of the heart.” — Unknown

“People change. Memories don’t.” — Unknown

“Sometimes you will never know the true value of a moment until it becomes a memory.” — Unknown

“Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.” — Unknown

“Life is shorter, live it. Love is rare, grab it. Anger is bad, dump it. Fear is awful, face it. Memories are sweet, cherish them.” — Unknown

“Life brings tears, smiles, and memories. The tears dry, the smiles fade, but the memories last forever.” — Unknown

“If your photos aren’t good enough, then you’re not close enough.” — Robert Capa

“When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear.” — Alfred Eisenstaedt

“I’m not all that interested in the subject of photography. Once the picture is in the box, I’m not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren’t cooks.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson

“You don’t take a photograph. You ask quietly to borrow it.” — Unknown

“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

“If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph.” — Ansel Adams

“Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.” — Diane Arbus

“What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are time and light.” — John Berger

“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

“The picture that you took with your camera is the imagination you want to create with reality.” — Scott Lorenzo

“A tear contains an ocean. A photographer is aware of the tiny moments in a persons life that reveal greater truths.” — Anonymous

“Essentially what photography is is life lit up.” — Sam Abell

“…we are there with our cameras to record reality. Once we start modifying that which exists, we are robbing photography of its most valuable attribute.”— Philip Jones Griffiths

“I don’t trust words. I trust pictures.” — Gilles Peress

“I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.” — Diane Arbus

“It’s about reacting to what you see, hopefully without preconception. You can find pictures anywhere. It’s simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what’s around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy.” — Elliott Erwitt

“Photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future.” — Sally Mann

“It’s more important for a photographer to have very good shoes, than to have a very good camera.” — Sebastiao Salgado

“Every artist has a central story to tell, and the difficulty, the impossible task, is trying to present that story in pictures.” — Gregory Crewdson

“Photography is truth.” — Jean-Luc Godard

“Photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the photo as a judgment that the photograph is good.” — Garry Winogrand

“Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.” — Berenice Abbott

“The pictures are there, and you just take them.” — Robert Capa

“Photography has nothing to do with cameras.” — Lucas Gentry

“There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.” — Ansel Adams

“The more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.” — Robert Mapplethorpe

“I am not interested in shooting new things – I am interested to see things new.” — Ernst Haas

“Photography to me is catching a moment which is passing, and which is true.” — Jacques-Henri Lartigue

“A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.” — Eudora Welty

“Sharpness is a bourgeois concept.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson

“It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera… they are made with the eye, heart and head.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson

“The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.” — Elliott Erwitt

“It’s not the photographer who makes the picture, but the person being photographed.” — Sebastiao Salgado

“Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn’t look like somebody else’s work.” — William Klein

“To know ahead of time what you’re looking for means you’re then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting, and often false.” — Dorothea Lange

“One doesn’t stop seeing. One doesn’t stop framing. It doesn’t turn off and turn on. It’s on all the time.” — Annie Leibovitz

“No place is boring, if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.” — Robert Adams

“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

“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

“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

“Since I’m inarticulate, I express myself with images.” — Helen Levitt

“Photography is pretty simple stuff. You just react to what you see, and take many, many pictures.” — Elliott Erwitt

“With photography, I like to create a fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society’s natural prejudice and giving this a twist.” — Martin Parr

“When people ask me what equipment I use – I tell them my eyes.” — Anonymous

“All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.” — Richard Avedon

“I suspect it is for one’s self-interest that one looks at one’s surroundings and one’s self. This search is personally born and is indeed my reason and motive for making photographs.” — Lee Friedlander

“The eye should learn to listen before it looks.” — Robert Frank

“Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.” — Garry Winogrand

“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life.” — Joan Miro

“I think good dreaming is what leads to good photographs.” — Wayne Miller

“Photography is a medium in which if you don’t do it then, very often you don’t do it at all, because it doesn’t happen twice.” — Paul Strand

“The photograph itself doesn’t interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson

“I love the people I photograph. I mean, they’re my friends. I’ve never met most of them or I don’t know them at all, yet through my images I live with them.” — Bruce Gilden

“If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff.” — Jim Richardson

“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

“One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.” — Dorothea Lange

“Photography helps people to see.” — Berenice Abbott

“Taking pictures is savoring life intensely every hundredth of a second.” — Marc Riboud

“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

“A landscape image cuts across all political and national boundaries, it transcends the constraints of language and culture.” — Charlie Waite

“My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.” — Steve McCurry

“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

“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

“Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.” — Yousuf Karsh

“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

“Photography is a small voice, at best, but sometimes one photograph, or a group of them, can lure our sense of awareness.” — W. Eugene Smith

“If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.” — Eve Arnold

“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson

“I like to photograph anyone before they know what their best angles are.” — Ellen Von Unwerth

“Seeing is not enough; you have to feel what you photograph.” — Andre Kertesz

“The best camera is the one that’s with you.” — Chase Jarvis

“Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.” — Peter Adams

“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

“I’m an amateur photographer, apart from being a professional one, and I think maybe my amateur pictures are the better ones.” — Elliott Erwitt

“Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.” — Ansel Adams

“Photographers stop photographing subjects too soon before they have exhausted the possibilities.” — Dorothea Lange

“A good photograph is knowing where to stand.” — Ansel Adams

“In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.” — August Sander

“To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition in a fraction of a second of the significance of an event.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson

“Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.” — Yousuf Karsh

“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

“If I have any ‘message’ worth giving to a beginner it is that there are no shortcuts in photography.” — Edward Weston

“A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.” — Dorothea Lange

“My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.” — Helmut Newton

“I think that emotional content is an image’s most important element, regardless of the photographic technique. Much of the work I see these days lacks the emotional impact to draw a reaction from viewers, or remain in their hearts.” — Anne Geddes

“Everyone will take one great picture, I’ve done better because I’ve taken two.”— David Bailey

“Composition is the strongest way of seeing.” — Edward Weston

“Photography is 1% talent and 99% moving furniture.” — Arnold Newman

“Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.” — Imogen Cunningham

“There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson

“A photograph is usually looked at – seldom looked into.” — Ansel Adams

“Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.” —Ansel Adams

“Sometimes I arrive just when God’s ready to have someone click the shutter.” —Ansel Adams

“The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it!” —Ansel Adams

“It is my intention to present – through the medium of photography, intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators.” —Ansel Adams

“For me, the camera is a sketchbook, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.” ― Henri Cartier-Bresson

“The picture is good or not from the moment it was caught in the camera.” ― Henri Cartier-Bresson

“In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv.” ― Henri Cartier-Bresson

“The important thing is, you have to have something important to say about the world.” ― Paul Strande

“It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.” ― Paul Strande

“It’s not enough to just own a camera. Everyone owns a camera. To be a photographer, you must understand, appreciate, and harness the power you hold!” ― Paul Strande

“The photographer does the world a great disservice when he leaves his camera at home.” ― Paul Strande

“When the world asks, “what was it like?” Only the photographers can say, “See!” ― Paul Strande

“Photographers don’t take pictures. They create images.” ― Mark Denman

“You don’t take pictures; the good ones happen to you.” — Ernst Haas

“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 context in which a photograph is seen affects the meaning the viewer draws from it.” —Stephen Shore

“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

“I’m very particular who I work with. I’m not interested in portraying women with a cliched, generic look. I’m interested in a model who I can take a portrait of.” — Tim Walker

“Your aim as a photographer is to get a picture of that person that means something. Portraits aren’t fantasies; they need to tell a truth.” — Tim Walker

“A woman said to me when she first sat down, You’re photographing the wrong side of my face. I said, Oh, is there one?” — Imogen Cunningham

“Photographs are just light and time.” — Aza Holmes

“The way that light hits objects, I think, is one of the more important things that sculpture and photography share.” — Rashid Johnson

“To some extent, the cult surrounding black-and-white photography is based on nostalgia.” — René Burri

“Only photography has been able to divide human life into a series of moments, each of them has the value of a complete existence.” — Eadweard Muybridge

“What do we feel when we look at a good photograph? We just want to be there, right at the exact moment that photo taken!” —Mehmet Murat Ildan

“A photographer without a magazine behind him is like a farmer without fields.” — Norman Parkinson

“ Photography has been my way of bearing witness to the joy I find in seeing the extraordinary in ordinary.” — Harold Feinstein

“Photography, to me, is catching a moment which is passing, and which is true.” — Jacques-Henri Lartigue

“The biggest cliche in photography is sunrise and sunset.” — Catherine Opie

“When a moment in front of me appears to be particularly special, whether it be by beauty or experience, I capture it. I usually find a reason to justify taking that photo – symmetry, or color or contrast – and it’s my hope that my photography sheds light onto what I see and do on a daily basis.” — Connor Franta

“My interest in photography is not to capture an image I see or even have in my mind, but to explore the potential of moments I can only begin to imagine.” — Lois Greenfield

“In photography, there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.” — Alfred Stieglitz

“Every viewer is going to get a different thing. That’s the thing about painting, photography, cinema.” — David Lynch

“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

“Black and white is abstract; color is not. Looking at a black and white photograph, you are already looking at a strange world.” — Joel Sternfeld

“I think that’s the strength of photography – to decide the decisive moment, to click in the moment to come up with a picture that never comes back again.” — Rene Burri

“Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man.” — Edward Steichen

“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

“The way that light hits objects in life, three-dimensional objects before you photograph them is really the story of photography.” — Rashid Johnson

“For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.” — Diane Arbus

“Technology has eliminated the basement darkroom and the whole notion of photography as an intense labor of love for obsessives and replaced them with a sense of immediacy and instant gratification.” — Joe McNally

“The whole nature of photography has changed with the advent of a camera in everybody’s hand.” — Sally Mann

“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

“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

“The camera doesn’t make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But, you have to SEE.” — Ernst Haas

“Essentially what photography is life lit up.” — Sam Abell

“A photograph is a moral decision taken in one-eighth of a second.” — Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“The camera has always been a guide, and it’s allowed me to see things and focus on things that may be an average person wouldn’t even notice.” — Don Chadwick

“What can be proved by a photograph can never be by a word.” — T.A

“Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.” — Walker Evans

“The cliche comes not in what you shoot but in how you shoot it.” — David duChemin, Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision

“Regarding the creative: never assume you’re the master, only the student. Your audience will determine if you’re masterful.” — Don Roff

“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

“Life is like Photography. You need the negatives to develop” — Ziad K. Abdelnour

“The camera makes you forget you’re there. It’s not like you are hiding, but you forget, you are just looking so much.” — Annie Leibovitz

“No matter how sophisticated the camera, the photographer is still the one that makes it.” — Doug Bartlow

“Photography is a means by which we learn to see the ordinary” – David Bailey

“If you wait, people will forget your camera, and the soul will drift up into view.” – Steve McCurry

“In my view, you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it.” — Émile Zola

“My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse, and entertain.” — Helmut Newton

“My pictures are about making people realize we’ve got to protect those who can’t speak for themselves.” — Michael “Nick” Nichols

“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

“Don’t shoot what it looks like, shoot what it feels like”. — David Alan Harvey

“When I make a photograph, I feel that I hold a piece of the universe in my hands.” — Paul Chaplo

“There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching.” — Sontag, Susan

“My best photo will be the last one that I want to be taken.” — Biju Karakkonam

“Do not take pictures to please the public; the photo should be spontaneous and free.” — Betty Poluk

“Some days, you just get lucky… Other days you wait patiently for luck to happen.” — Destin Sparks

“My photography is the result of being there at the right moment.” — René Burri

“I take the same picture twice. First, with my heart, then camera.” — Biju Karakkonam

“If you don’t think photos are important, wait until they’re all you have left.” — Missy Mwac

“Whosoever possesses a camera should never know boredom.” — Wayne Gerard Trotman

“The camera is a mirror with a memory, but it cannot think.” — Arnold Newman

“What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment’s that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.” — Karl Iagerfeld

“Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints, kill nothing but time.” — Unknown

“I began to realize that the camera sees the world differently than the human eye and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed.” — Galen Rowell

“The two most engaging powers of a photograph are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.”— William Thackeray

“When you photograph a face…you photograph the soul behind it.” — Jean-Luc Godard

“I like capturing stuff that is disappearing that’s the point of photography. What I am photographing is an imaginary place that never existed, but is connected to something that has already been.” — Tim Walker

“If we want our pictures + stories to really mean something, to serve a real purpose, then we have to give them better attention, more often.” — Marie Masse

“It’s a world, someone’s face. When I capture it, I see the future of the world.” – Malick Sidibé

“I’m trying to capture something more fragile than a regular story. I love what people bring me.” — Agnes Varda

“For me, every photograph is a portrait; the clothes are just a vehicle for what I want to say.” – Peter Lindbergh

“The world makes up my pictures, not me.” – Lee Friedlander

“Photographs are just light and time.” – John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“Some memories are unforgettable, remaining ever vivid and heartwarming!” – Joseph B. Wirthlin

“Kodak sells film, but they don't advertise film. They advertise memories.” –Theodore Levitt

“I have a very good memory, but it's short. Thank god for photography.” – John E. Burkowski

“My memories mean a lot to me, and I hold them close to my heart.” – Radhika Apte

“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

“Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.” – Corrie Ten Boom

“Capturing the moments of today that will wow your hearts tomorrow. Life is short. Capture every moment.” — Unknown

“I collect memories. I look for opportunities to try new things, go to new places, and meet new people all the time.” — Marcel Wanders

“What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.” — Karl Lagerfeld

“It's great to reminisce about good memories of my past. It was enjoyable when it was today. So learning to enjoy today has two benefits: it gives me happiness right now, and it becomes a good memory later.” — George Foreman

“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life.” — Joan Miro

“Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever…It remembers little things long after you’ve forgotten everything.” — Aaron Siskind

“I believe that without memories there is no lif , and that our memories should be of happy times.” — Lee Radziwill

“Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.” — Ambrose Bierce

“Photography is a love affair with life.” — Burk Uzzle

“The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.” — Elliott Erwitt

“Photography helps people to see.” — Berenice Abbott

“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

“Photography is truth.” – Jean-Luc Godard

“I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.” — Diane Arbus

“Photography to me is catching a moment which is passing, and which is true.” — Jacques-Henri Lartigue

“A good snapshot keeps a moment that’s gone from running away.” — Eudora Welty

“If you don’t capture the moments, they will be gone forever.” – Lailah Gifty Akita

“It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera… they are made with the eye, heart, and head.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson

“A photographer who made a picture from a splendid moment, an accidental pose of someone or beautiful scenery, is the finder of treasure.” — Robert Doisneau

“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” — Susan Sontag

“It’s amazing how photography can capture just a split second of something exquisite.” — Kiera Cass

“Only photograph what you love.” — Tim Walker

“Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.” — Alfred Stieglitz

“A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.” – Annie Leibovitz

“The pictures are there, and you just take them.” – Robert Capa

“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

“I love the people I photograph. I mean, they’re my friends. I’ve never met most of them or I don’t know them at all, yet through my images I live with them.” – Bruce Gilden

“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

“If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera.” — Lewis Hine

“When the world asks, ‘What was it like?’ Only the photographers can say, ‘See!’” — Mark Denman

“How do we start taking pictures of people, and stop taking pictures of poses?” — Justin and Mary Marantz

“I’ve always believed that photography is a way to shape human perception.” — James Balog

“To me, the magic of photography, per se, is that you can capture an instant of a second that couldn’t exist before and couldn’t exist after. It’s almost like a cowboy that draws his gun. You draw a second before or after, you miss and you’re dead – not them. To me, photography’s always like that.” — Mario Testino

“A camera is a SAVE button for the mind’s eye.” — Roger Kingston

“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

“I love this life. I feel like I am always catching my breath and saying, ‘Oh! Will you look at that?’ Photography has been my way of bearing witness to the joy I find in seeing the extraordinary in ordinary life. You don’t look for pictures. Your pictures are looking for you.” — Harold Feinstein

“When you photograph a face… you photograph the soul behind it.” — Jean-Luc Godard

“When a moment in front of me appears to be particularly special, whether it be by beauty or experience, I capture it. I usually find a reason to justify taking that photo - symmetry, or color, or contrast - and it’s my hope that my photography sheds light onto what I see and do on a daily basis.” — Connor Franta

“Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.” — David Alan Harvey

“Photography is like a moment, an instant. You need a half-second to get the photo. So it’s good to capture people when they are themselves.” — Patrick Demarchelier

“A photograph is memory in the raw.” — Carrie Latet

“Because it’s free, easy to use, and high-quality, photography is now a fixture in our daily lives–something we take for granted.” — Peter Diamandis

“Photography is about capturing souls not smiles.” — Dragan Tapshanov

“Photography is a small voice, at best, but sometimes one photograph, or a group of them, can lure our sense of awareness.” — W. Eugene Smith

“My photography is the result of being there at the right moment.” — Rene Burri

“Photography is the beauty of life captured.” — Tara Chisolm

“Imagine there wasn’t photography? Where would we be? How would I remember what I looked like as a kid? It links us all. It keeps us together. It’s what our history is.” — Jerry Della Femina

“I walk, I look, I see, I stop, I photograph.” — Leon Levinstein

“I’m so drawn to photography because you can convey a complex story in a single frame.” — Gia Coppola

“Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.” — Steven Pinker

“There are no bad pictures; that's just how your face looks sometimes.” — Abraham Lincoln

“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

“Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell.” — Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter

“When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.” — Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

“Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.” — Alfred Stieglitz

“In twenty years you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked.” — Mary Schmich

“Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.” — Ansel Adams

“Actually, it's nature itself that creates the most beautiful pictures, I'm only choosing the perspective.” — Katja Michael

“Pictures could not be accessories to the story–evidence–they had to contain the story within the frame; the best picture contained a whole war within one frame.” — Tatjana Soli, The Lotus Eaters

“There's something about photography I love -- a whole memory caught in a moment.” — Rebecca Serle, One Italian Summer

“There has never been a great moment without a great picture.” — Vic Stah Milien

“All my pictures are portraits of my soul.” — Romi Florea

“Only a Photographer can stop time. Just by one click.” — Biju Karakkonam

“Regardless of whether you speak the language or are familiar with a culture, the picture should hold up.” — Herb Ritts

“Photography can be a way into worlds and memories that words sometimes fail to convey.” — Stacy Martin

“Capturing a beautiful moment in a photo is something I’m very passionate about.” — Nigel Barker

“There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.” — Ansel Adams

“If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” — Robert Capa

“To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson

“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

“All the planning, intuition, technical prowess, and knowledge, as well as the trust and rapport you have (or haven’t) established, will show up in the picture, frozen forever.” — Gregory Heisler

“A photojournalist makes snap decisions; based on the ability to quickly assess situations and record one’s perceived truth.” — Jack Dykinga

“A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.” — Diane Arbus

“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

“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

“Without vision, the photographer perishes.” — David duChemin

“Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell.” — Kim Edwards

“There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph.” — Robert Heinecken

“There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” — Ansel Adams

“ The eye should learn to listen before it looks.” — Robert Frank

“Art is what we call…the thing an artist does. It’s not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human. Art is not in the …eye of the beholder. It’s in the soul of the artist.” — Seth Godin

“Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality…One can’t possess reality, one can possess images–one can’t possess the present but one can possess the past.” — Susan Sontag

“A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is thereby a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.” — Ansel Adams

“What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.” — Roland Barthes

“A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you.” — Brigitte Bardot

“ Above all, life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference.” — Robert Frank

“For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.” — Diane Arbus

“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

“No, you don’t shoot things. You capture them. Photography means painting with light. And that’s what you do. You paint a picture only by adding light to the things you see.” — Katja Michael

“My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.” — Richard Avedon

“Sometimes one waits too long for the perfect moment before snapping the picture. You never realize that you needed was to change perspective.” — Miguel Syjuco

“The world moves fast, changing everything around us with each new day. Photography is a gift that can keep us in a moment forever, blissfully eternal.” — Ali Novak

“ The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.” — Andy Warhol

“Work very hard, until you don’t have to introduce yourself anymore.” — Roberto Vazquez

“If Photoshop is the answer, you’re asking the wrong question.” — Dean Farrell

“Yes, it took me just a moment to draw this line with the brush. But it took me months, perhaps even years, of reflection to form the idea.” — Joan Miró

“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

“We don’t learn from our good images; we learn from the ones that can be improved on.” — Jen Rozenbaum

“The best camera is the one you have with you.” — Chase Jarvis

“A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.” — Ansel Adams

“Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn’t look like somebody else’s work." — William Klein

“A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.” — George Bernard Shaw

“You cannot possibly hit the shutter without leaving a piece of you in the image.” — Joe Buissink

“Fear is the thing that prohibits a lot of photographers from reaching their full potential.” — Collin Pierson

“Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.” — Ansel Adams

“To me, a photograph means the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the meaning of an event on the one hand and the exact arrangement of the visually perceived forms expressing that event on the other.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson

“You don’t take pictures, they take you.” — Jay Maisel

“In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” — Andy Warhol

“My ultimate goal is to try to make the ordinary look extraordinary.” — Martin Parr

“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

“If you can smell the street by looking at the photo, it’s a street photograph.” — Bruce Gilden

“I think of photography like therapy.” — Harry Gruyaert

“John White, another Pulitzer Prize winning photographer at the Sun-Times once told me he photographed every sunrise. In disbelief, I inquired why? He simply said he didn’t want to miss the really great one.” — Jack Dykinga

“Whatever happens in front of the lens stays. What’s captured during the encounter is all that exists.” — Gregory Heisler

450+ Famous Inspirational & Powerful Photography Quotes