Photographer Quotations

I didn't decide to be a photographer; I just happened to fall into it.

You've got to push yourself harder. You've got to start looking for pictures nobody else could take. You've got to take the tools you have and probe deeper.

Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.

Photographers must learn not to be ashamed to have their photographs look like photographs.

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.

A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.

The most important thing you learn as a sports photographer is anticipation - not where the action is taking place, but where it's going to take place. Not where the subject is now, but where they're going to be.

I've been a documentary photographer for much longer than I have been a filmmaker.

The camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is.

Most photographers would feel a certain embarrassment in admitting publicly that they carried within them a sense of wonder, yet without it they would not produce the work they do, whatever their particular field.

Several people feel I have photographed God. May be.

A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.

A photographer without a magazine behind him is like a farmer without fields.

When people ask how have I kept on top, I have to say with the help of every photographer, make-up artist and hairdresser I've ever worked with.

Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.

My hope is that we continue to nurture the places that we love, but that we also look outside our immediate worlds.

I'd very much like to create my own style as a photographer, even if it's just for myself.

I can get obsessed by anything if i look at it long enough. That's the curse of being a photographer.

It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.

Be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence.

If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough.

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

I don't work with inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs. I just get to work.

I like form and shape and strength in pictures.

I've been a photographer all these years... I haven't been in my own darkroom for 10 years.

Anything that excites me for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual.

Essentially what photography is is life lit up.

There are so many artists that are dyslexic or learning disabled, it's just phenomenal. There's also an unbelievably high proportion of artists who are left-handed, and a high correlation between left-handedness and learning disabilities.

We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium.

No photographer is as good as the simplest camera.

What is right? Simply put, it is any assignment in which the photographer has a significant spiritual stake...spiritually driven work constitutes the core of a photographer's contribution to culture.

I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around, that nothing was more or less important.

The more specific you are, the more general it'll be.

The still must tease with the promise of a story the viewer of it itches to be told.

I am an artist first and a photographer second.

A good photograph is knowing where to stand.

I hope to be a producer, a musician, a painter, a photographer - I'm going to push myself to do as many things as I can and see where it goes.

Like most photographers, I try to capture a moment in my work.

I had a background in theater as an actor, and then a photographer, and then as an experimental filmmaker and editor.

My big dream was to work as a photographer for 'National Geographic.'

People, photographers, people in the press can sometimes be inappropriate.

The reason I call myself a documentary photographer is the idea of how photographs contain and participate in history.

A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into.

Anybody can be a great photographer if they zoom in enough on what they love.

My father, an architectural photographer, was an incurable tinkerer, maker and mender.

I think photographers are too polite. There is not enough anger in photography; it's pretty much trivialized.

I've been an amateur photographer since my teens.

Even though photographers are only shooting the outside, beauty is more about who you are as a person - the life you lead - not your facade.

I'm not a serious photographer like many of my contemporaries. That is to say, I am serious about not being serious.

And most of my early pictures failed but about one in a 100 somehow looked better than what I saw.

When I make a picture, I make love.

I was the official wedding photographer at one of my best friends' weddings. Fortunately she was one of the most easygoing brides ever, so she made it easy for me.

The language that photography has is a formal language. Any photographer is doing something formal. If it's formal, then it must be an aesthetic way to communicate.

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

The visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable.

Be sure to take the lens cap off before photographing.

My best work is often almost unconscious and occurs ahead of my ability to understand it.

I don't get wrapped up in technique and the like.

I was known as a 35-mm photographer with a view-camera mentality.

I get photographers hiding in my bushes. We're way past autographs. We're into being stalked and followed.

I'm an amateur photographer, apart from being a professional one, and I think maybe my amateur pictures are the better ones.

I never wanted to be called an artist. I wanted to be called a photographer.

Some photographers take reality... and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation.

My dad had been an ardent amateur photographer, and he taught me to compose a photograph from the back to the front, and then populate the picture.

I started as a news photographer at the University Of Texas' Daily Texan.

There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.

I wanted life to be episodic. I wanted to be a magazine photographer and I was willing to do what it took to become that.

One of my all-time favorite photographers is Irving Penn. I wish I could have watched him work.

Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter.

When you are younger, the camera is like a friend and you can go places and feel like you're with someone, like you have a companion.

If it makes you cry, it goes in the show.

You don't have to sort of enhance reality. There is nothing stranger than truth.

I'm not a photographer, so I need all the help I can get when it comes to make a picture look cool.

I admired the work of photographers like Beaton, Penn, and Avedon as much as I respected the grittier photographers such as Robert Frank. But in the same way that I had to find my own way of reportage, I had to find my own form of glamour.

A very subtle difference can make the picture or not.

I'm a writer. An amateur photographer. An actor.

My relationships with producers or photographers - these are relationships that took years.

Especially when you are advertising a product, I talk to the photographer and we create a character - it always gives you more freedom because it makes it less about yourself.

I sometimes like the pictures photographers take of me.

Even in the nineties, when it was mad and there were photographers all around the house, it never occurred to me to send someone else out to get cigarettes. It took me five minutes - went for a walk, gave a wave, went back inside.

I don't meet stockbrokers or carpenters or coal miners; I spend all day with actors, composers and photographers.

I never set out to be a photographer.

I would like to become a better photographer. I'm working on that.

I believe in a visual language that should be as strong as the written word.

Success to me is being a good person, treating people well.

Photographers, you will never become artists. All you are is mere copiers.

I haven't seen too many images that have impressed me!

I'm not a nice girl. I'm a photographer.

You scientists are the worst photographers in the world and you need the best photographers in the world and I'm the one to do it.

...the art is in selecting what is worthwhile to take the trouble about...

I agree that all good photographs are documents, but I also know that all documents are certainly not good photographs. Furthermore, a good photographer does not merely document, he probes the subject, he ‘uncovers’ it …

Photography helps people to see.

I've thought of becoming a photographer! To save my talent as a writer.

Those who call themselves art photographers are pompous, arrogant egoists.

All the photographers were trying to just get me off, which was hilarious. But it was very, very amusing.

The camera is a kind of license.

I think the most beautiful inventions are the ones you don't think of.

I'm very little drawn to photographing people that are known or even subjects that are known. They fascinate me when I've barely heard of them.

The camera is cruel, so I try to be as good as I can to make things even.

...I would never choose a subject for what it means to me. I choose a subject and then what I feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold.