Shoot a Quote: Photography Quotes for the Ages
A set of old cameras standing in an antique camera store.|Credit: Reynaldo Cruz Diaz
Weird as it may seem, I believe we as photographers can learn from photography quotes and facts as much as we can from seeing pictures or reading about techniques and seeing other photographers’ work. Learning about settings, shutter techniques, composition and other tricks can make our photography improve exponentially. In addition, looking at the work of other photographers, mainly historic and famous ones, or successful ones in our field, can open our eyes to different perspectives and angles.
However, we cannot rule out the importance of reading what other photographers have to say, mainly if we are talking about photographers who have succeeded in the industry. Their words carry wisdom, and teach us how to approach our own photography, how to feel and even how to shoot impactful images.
I made a list of a group of my favorite ones. Yet, I will probably be editing this post constantly as I found some other quotes.
Whenever photography quotes are mentioned, there is one quote that comes into my mind right away. This quote is something I have used every single time I have taught photography, and it is by no other than the great Henri Cartier-Bresson, who happens to be not only one of the greatest photographers ever, but also one with some of the sharpest quotes:
“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson
With this principle, I looked into different sources and made a selection of some of my favorite.
“What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.” ― Karl Lagerfeld
“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.” ― Ansel Adams
“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
“There are no bad pictures; that's just how your face looks sometimes.” ― Abraham Lincoln
“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
“Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.” ― Marc Riboud
“You don't take a photograph, you make it.” ― Ansel Adams
“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” ― Dorothea Lange
“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
“A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.” ― Eudora Welty
“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” ― Henri Cartier-Bresson
“A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.” ― Ansel Adams
“To the complaint, 'There are no people in these photographs,' I respond, There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.” ― Ansel Adams
“For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.” ― Henri Cartier-Bresson
“It's more important for a photographer to have very good shoes, than to have a very good camera.” — Sebastião Salgado
“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” ― Susan Sontag
“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
“There’s something strange and powerful about black and white imagery.” — Stefan Kanfer
“The subject matter is so much more important than the photographer.” — Gordon Parks
“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
“There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.” ― Ansel Adams
“There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.” — Robert Frank
“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
“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
“Sometimes I arrive just when God's ready to have someone click the shutter.” ― Ansel Adams
“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
“Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.” — Joe McNally
“I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.” ― Mahatma Gandhi
“You photograph with all your ideology.” — Sebastião Salgado
“There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” ― Ansel Adams
“A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second. ” ― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
“When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear.” — Alfred Eisenstaedt
“It's not the photographer who makes the picture, but the person being photographed.” — Sebastião Salgado
“A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.” ― George Bernard Shaw
Quotes from Movies about Photography
There are several movies about photography, and most of them end up bringing very interesting quotes. Screenwriters have done a great job bringing poignant phrases that reflect reality, sometimes paraphrasing some of the concepts and ideas expressed by some of the greatest photographers ever.
"We're all so frightened by time, the way it moves on and the way things disappear. That's why we're photographers. We're preservationists by nature. We take pictures to stop time, to commit moments to eternity. Human nature made tangible." — Benjamin Asher Ryder, Kodachrome
"People are taking more pictures now than ever before, billions of them, but there are no slides, no prints. Just data. Electronic dust. Years from now when they dig us up there won't be any pictures to find, no record of who we were or how we lived." — Benjamin Asher Ryder, Kodachrome
“Once you start asking those questions you can't stop. So we don't ask. We record so other people ask.” — Lee Smith, Civil War
“Every time I survived a war zone, I thought I was sending a warning home - "Don't do this". But here we are.” — Lee Smith, Civil War
Quotes by War Photographer Robert Capa
Now that we have mentioned, and been hearing about the movie “Civil War” and heard a lot of comments on the role of photojournalists in war reporting, it would be interesting to see some of the things that Robert Capa, one of the epitomes of war photography, has said.
“If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough.”
“You don't have to pose your camera. The pictures are there, and you just take them. The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda.” (On the Spanish Civil War, 1937)
“What's the point of getting killed if you've got the wrong exposure?”
Q: Do you really distance yourself from your subject? I mean, what would you do if you were presented with a young girl burning to death?
A: About 1/60 at f5.6.
“I hope to stay unemployed as a war photographer till the end of my life.”
“It's not always easy to stand aside and be unable to do anything except record the sufferings around one.”
“The war is like an actress who is getting old. It's less and less photogenic and more and more dangerous.” (1944)
“In a war, you must hate somebody or love somebody; you must have a position or you cannot stand what goes on.”
“The [concentration camps] were swarming with photographers and every new picture of horror served only to diminish the total effect. Now, for a short day, everyone will see what happened to those poor devils in those camps; tomorrow, very few will care what happens to them in the future.”
“The war correspondent has his stake - his life - in his own hands, and he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute.”
“For a war correspondent to miss an invasion is like refusing a date with Lana Turner.”
Conclusion
In summary, photographers have always been (and will always be) complex characters. Grasping every drop of reality and capturing on camera comes with a lot captured by the emotion of having been there. The act of photography sometimes involves a positive emotion, sometimes a negative one: a smell, a noise, the pain, the fear, the joy, the taste. That is why I will always believe in reading what other photographers have said.
After all, they have not become great by not knowing.
Sources ______________________
On Photography, by Susan Sontag
