Photography is much more than pressing a button. It’s an art form, a mode of expression, and a profound way of seeing the world. Just as every picture speaks a thousand words, the words of master photographers can offer a window into the depths of their craft.
The medium of photography has inspired many quotes over the years. Whether you’re an avid photographer or an admirer, we hope these quotes will resonate and inspire you.
99 Photography Quotes
We’ve gathered our 99 favorite photography quotes below. These quotes shed light on the philosophies, visions, and emotions intertwined with photography.
We’ve split them up into eight sections:
- General Photography Quotes
- Camera and Photo Quotes
- Photography Mindset and Feelings
- Reality and Illusion
- Picture-Taking and Composition
- People and Portrait Photography Quotes
- Language, Nature, and LIght
- Photography Thoughts
General Photography Quotes
1. “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” – Ansel Adams
2. “Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.” – Marc Riboud
3. “What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.” – John Berger
4. “Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.” – Dorothea Lange
5. “To photograph is to hold one’s breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
6. “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
7. “I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.” – Diane Arbus
8. “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.” – William Albert Allard
9. “You don’t take a photograph. You ask quietly to borrow it.” – Author Unknown
10. “The more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
11. “You just have to live and life will give you pictures.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
Camera and Photo Quotes
12. “When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear.” – Alfred Eisenstaedt
13. “The best camera is the one you have with you.” – Chase Jarvis
14. “For me, the camera is a sketchbook, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant, which—in visual terms—questions and decides simultaneously.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
15. “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” – Dorothea Lange
16. “The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?” – Edward Weston
17. “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
18. “I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.” – John Steinbeck
19. “Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.” – Joe McNally
20. “Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper the photographer begins with the finished product.” – Edward Steichen
21. “Every photograph is a certificate of presence.” – Roland Barthes
22. “Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.” – Ambrose Bierce
23. “What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.” – Roland Barthes
24. “What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.” – Karl Lagerfeld
25. “A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you.” – Brigitte Bardot
26. “The negative is the equivalent of the composer’s score and the print the performance.” – Ansel Adams
Photography Mindset and Feelings
27. “Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.” – Yousuf Karsh
28. “The camera captures light, our minds capture images.” – Unknown Author
29. “I’m always mentally photographing everything as practice.” – Minor White
30. “I believe photographers should shoot what they want, not shoot what they get.” – Roberto Valenzuela
31. “The photographer is filled with doubt. Nothing will soothe him.” – Raymond Depardon
32. “I can get obsessed by anything if I look at it long enough. That’s the curse of being a photographer.” – Irving Penn
33. “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.” – Bill Brandt
34. “I have always felt that photography is a language for seeing and not for transforming, hiding, or modifying reality. I allow its intrinsic magic to reveal to our gaze the spaces, objects, and landscapes I want to represent.” – Luigi Gurri
35. “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
36. “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
37. “The best way to go into an unknown territory is to go in ignorant, ignorant as possible, with your mind wide open, as wide open as possible and not having to meet anyone else’s requirement but my own.” – Dorothea Lange
38. “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
39. “The goal is not to change your subjects, but for the subject to change the photographer.” – Author Unknown
40. “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
Reality and Illusion
41. “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” – Diane Arbus
42. “Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.” – Duane Michals
43. “Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our private world.” – Arnold Newman
44. “Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.” – Alfred Stieglitz
45. “The photograph itself doesn’t interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
46. “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.” – Susan Sontag
47. “Photography is truth.” – Jean-Luc Godard
48. “A photograph isn’t necessarily a lie, but nor is it the truth. It’s more of a fleeting, subjective impression. What I most like about photography is the moment that you can’t anticipate: you have to be constantly watching for it, ready to welcome the unexpected.” – Martine Franck
49. “Your photography is a record of your living—for anyone who really sees.” – Paul Strand
50. “Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real.” – Ansel Adams
51. “In photography, there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.” – Alfred Stieglitz
52. “The picture that you took with your camera is the imagination you want to create with reality.” – Scott Lorenzo
Picture-Taking and Composition
53. “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” – Robert Capa
54. “We must avoid… snapping away, shooting quickly and without thought, overloading ourselves with unnecessary images that clutter our memory and diminish the clarity of the whole.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
55. “In my mind’s eye, I visualize how a particular . . . sight and feeling 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
56. “Every photograph is a battle of form versus content.” – Garry Winogrand
57. “There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.” – Ansel Adams
58. “The key to good photography is… to be able to really see what’s in front of you.” – Joachim Ladefoged
59. “There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.” – Ansel Adams
60. “I shoot a little bit, maybe two rolls, medium format, which is 20 pictures, and if it’s not working, I change the position.” – Annie Leibovitz
61. “My theory of composition? Simple: do not release the shutter until everything in the viewfinder feels just right.” – Ernst Haas
62. “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
63. “It’s not how a photographer looks at the world that is important. It’s their intimate relationship with it.” – Antoine D’Agata
64. “The eye should learn to listen before it looks.” – Robert Frank
65. “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
People and Portrait Photography Quotes
66. “The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.” – Andy Warhol
67. “A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.” – Edward Steichen
68. “There is no single form or style of portraiture. Portraiture means individualism and as such means diversity, self-expression, private point of view. The most successful images seem to be those which exist on several planes at once and which reflect the fantasy and understanding of many.” – Peter Bunnell
69. “I like to photograph anyone before they know what their best angles are.” – Ellen Von Unwerth
70. “A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.” – Annie Leibovitz
71. “It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.” – Alfred Eisenstaedt
72. “A tear contains an ocean. A photographer is aware of the tiny moments in a person’s life that reveal greater truths.” – Author Unknown
73. “In my portraits, I try to convey the essence of the person.” – Eve Arnold
74. “Photography has the capacity to provide images of man and his environment that are both works of art and moments in history.” – Cornell Capa
75. “To photograph people is to violate them… it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.” – Susan Sontag
76. “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
77. “There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.” – Robert Frank
Language, Nature, and Light
78. “Photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world.” – Bruno Barbey
79. “Photography is the story I fail to put into words.” – Destin Sparks
80. “The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.” – Elliott Erwitt
81. “I don’t trust words. I trust pictures.” – Gilles Peress
82. “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.” – Ansel Adams
83. “The Earth is Art, The Photographer is only a Witness.” – Yann Arthus-Bertrand
84. “I wish that all of nature’s magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of a place could be photographed.” – Annie Leibovitz
85. “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
86. “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
Photography Thoughts
87. “Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
88. “A photograph is a click away. A good photograph is a hundred clicks away and a better one, a thousand clicks away.” – Kowtham Kumar K
89. “You have to take a lot of bad pictures. Dont’ be afraid to take bad pictures… You have to take a lot of bad pictures in order to know when you’ve got a good one.” – Martin Parr
90. “To photograph is to confer importance.” – Susan Sontag
91. “A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence.” – Susan Sontag
92. “Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.” – Edward Steichen
93. “I think of photography like therapy.” – Harry Gruyaert
94. “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.” – Richard Avedon
95. “Every time someone tells me how sharp my photos are, I assume that it isn’t a very interesting photograph. If it were, they would have more to say.” – Author Unknown
96. “I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.” – Mahatma Gandhi
97. “Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” – Susan Sontag
98. “The two most engaging powers of a photograph are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.” – William Thackeray
99. “We are not interested in the unusual, but in the usual seen unusually.” – Beaumont Newhall
What’s Next?
We hope you enjoyed the profound insights from photography’s finest. As you reflect on the above photography quotes, let them inspire action.
Pick up your camera. Seek beauty in the everyday. Capture moments that resonate with you.
Let these quotes guide you, and share your unique view with the world. Because every picture you take adds to the grand mosaic of life’s experiences. So, get out there—click, capture, and create!
Ready to get started? Have a look at our posts on the best indoor photography settings, fog photography,or essential camera angles next!
