Quotes from famous photographers

I found a small collection of quotes by well-known photographers, artists, and writers, and I'm glad to share them here. I chose only the lines that stayed with me personally, so the list is not huge. But every quote here matters to me because it reflects how I think about photography, art, observation, and the way a photographer works with life.

Photography Quotes with Lost or Unclear Authorship

First, I want to share several quotes that stayed with me, even though their authorship is unclear. I tried to trace the original sources honestly, but in some cases I could not find reliable attribution. Some of these lines are anonymous, while others are attributed to different well-known photographers depending on the source. When the same phrase appears under different names, I prefer not to assign it to someone without proof. If I ever find a stronger source, I will update the attribution.

• Buying a camera doesn't make you a photographer. It makes you a camera owner.
• A tear contains an ocean. A photographer is aware of the tiny moments in a person's life that reveal greater truths.
• My best photograph will be the last one that I want to take.
• I take the same picture twice, first with my heart, then with my camera.
   – often attributed to Biju Karakkonam
• Like in Wonderland, photographers have to keep running just to stay in the same place. To move forward, they have to run twice as fast and do it with purpose.

Selected Quotes by Great Photographers

Now let's turn to the great photographers. These are names almost everyone in photography knows. I respect their work and their contribution to the history of the medium. Each of them deserves a separate article, but even a few of their phrases are enough to make you stop and think.

Quotes by Alfred Eisenstaedt (Alfred Eisenstaedt)

Alfred Eisenstaedt was a German-born American photographer and photojournalist.
He was born in 1898 in what is now Poland and died in 1995 at the age of 96.

Here are my favorite Eisenstaedt quotes. The order is random, so there is no hidden hierarchy or ranking.

• It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.
   – Alfred Eisenstaedt
• We are only beginning to learn what to say in a photograph. The world we live in is a succession of fleeting moments, any one of which might say something significant.
   – Alfred Eisenstaedt
• If I have a camera in my hand, I don't know fear.
   – Alfred Eisenstaedt
• I dream that someday the step between my mind and my finger will no longer be needed. And that simply by blinking my eyes, I shall make pictures. Then, I think, I shall really have become a photographer.
   – Alfred Eisenstaedt
• Once the amateur's naive approach and humble willingness to learn fades away, the creative spirit of good photography dies with it.
   – Alfred Eisenstaedt
• The important thing is not the camera but the eye.
   – Alfred Eisenstaedt

Quotes by Henri Cartier-Bresson (Henri Cartier-Bresson)

Henri Cartier-Bresson was born in 1908 and died in 2004 at the age of 95.

He was a French artist and humanist photographer, often described as a master of candid photography. He was one of the early users of 35 mm film, which made the camera more portable and allowed photographers to work faster and more freely than with older, heavier equipment. That is one reason he is often linked with the foundations of modern photojournalism and street photography. Together with Robert Capa, George Rodger, and David Seymour, he co-founded Magnum Photos in 1947, one of the most important photographer-led agencies in the world.

• Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.
   – Henri Cartier-Bresson
• For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously.
   – Henri Cartier-Bresson
• To think should be done before and after, not during photographing.
   – Henri Cartier-Bresson
• To photograph is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.
   – Henri Cartier-Bresson
  In French, the original is usually given as:
  Photographier, c'est mettre sur la même ligne de mire la tête, l'œil et le cœur.
• Composition must be one of our constant preoccupations, but at the moment of shooting it can stem only from our intuition.
   – Henri Cartier-Bresson
• Of course, it's all luck.
   – Henri Cartier-Bresson
• To take a photograph is to hold one's breath when all faculties converge in the face of fleeing reality.
   – Henri Cartier-Bresson
• Photography is a means of understanding which cannot be separated from other means of visual expression. It is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It is a way of life.
   – Henri Cartier-Bresson
• Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.
   – Henri Cartier-Bresson
• Photography is nothing, it's life that interests me.
   – Henri Cartier-Bresson
• The photograph itself does not interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.
   – Henri Cartier-Bresson
• Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes a precise moment in time.
   – Henri Cartier-Bresson
• To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.
   – Henri Cartier-Bresson
• Photography is a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity.
   – Henri Cartier-Bresson
• 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.
   – Henri Cartier-Bresson
• We 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
• The photographer must always work with the greatest respect for his subject and in terms of his own point of view.
   – Henri Cartier-Bresson

Quotes by Ansel Adams (Ansel Adams)

Ansel Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist, best known for his black-and-white images of the American West.
He was born in 1902 and died in 1984 at the age of 82.

• There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.
   – Ansel Adams
• Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.
   – Ansel Adams
• You don't take a photograph, you make it.
   – Ansel Adams
• Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.
   – Ansel Adams
• A photograph is usually looked at, seldom looked into.
   – Ansel Adams
• A good photograph is knowing where to stand.
   – Ansel Adams
• Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.
   – Ansel Adams
• When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.
   – Ansel Adams
• The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it.
   – Ansel Adams
• Photography is austere and blazing poetry of the real.
   – Ansel Adams
• Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter.
   – Ansel Adams
• In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.
   – Ansel Adams
• A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.
   – Ansel Adams
• There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.
   – Ansel Adams
• A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.
   – Ansel Adams
• To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces and record the qualities of nature and humanity which live or are latent in all things.
   – Ansel Adams
• 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.
   – Ansel Adams
• Not everybody trusts paintings, but people believe photographs.
   – Ansel Adams
• There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.
   – Ansel Adams
• Photography is not an accident. It is a concept. It exists at, or before, the moment of exposure of the negative.
   – Ansel Adams
• My last word is that it all depends on what you visualize.
   – Ansel Adams

Quotes often attributed to Ansel Adams, but more correctly linked to Arnold Newman

Some quotes that are often repeated under Ansel Adams's name are better linked to Arnold Newman. I prefer to keep them separate, because Newman's words come from a different photographic world: environmental portraiture, studio work, and the psychological relationship between photographer, subject, and space.

• 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
• We do not make photographs with our cameras. We make them with our minds, with our hearts, with our ideas.
   – Arnold Newman
• The camera is a mirror with a memory, but it cannot think.
   – Arnold Newman
• The photographer must be a part of the picture.
   – Arnold Newman
• There are no rules and regulations for perfect composition. If there were, we would be able to put all the information into a computer and would come out with a masterpiece. We know that's impossible. You have to compose by the seat of your pants.
   – Arnold Newman
• I am always lining things up, measuring angles, even during this interview. I'm observing the way you sit and the way you fit into the composition of the space around you.
   – Arnold Newman
• Fantasy is like poetry; it can point to the truth.
   – Arnold Newman
• Photography is 1% talent and 99% moving furniture.
   – Arnold Newman
• Those who call themselves art photographers are pompous, arrogant egoists.
   – Arnold Newman

Quotes by Steve McCurry (Steve McCurry)

Steve McCurry is an American photographer, freelancer, and photojournalist. His image Afghan Girl, showing a young girl with striking green eyes, became one of the most recognizable National Geographic photographs. McCurry has worked on many assignments for National Geographic and has been associated with Magnum Photos since 1986.
He was born in 1950.

• Most of my images are grounded in people. I look for the unguarded moment, the essential soul peeking out, experience etched on a person's face.
   – Steve McCurry
• My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.
   – Steve McCurry
• If you wait, people will forget your camera and the soul will drift up into view.
   – Steve McCurry
• The definition of a great picture is one that stays with you, one that you can't forget. It doesn't have to be technically good at all.
   – Steve McCurry
• If you want to be a photographer, first leave home.
   – Steve McCurry
• If you want to be a photographer, you have to photograph.
   – Steve McCurry
• Some of the great pictures happen along the journey and not necessarily at your destination.
   – Steve McCurry
• I strive for individual pictures that will burn in people's memories.
   – Steve McCurry
• I think life is too short not to be doing something which you really believe in.
   – Steve McCurry
• We photographers say we 'take' a picture, and in a sense that is true. We do take something from people's lives, but we also tell their story.
   – Steve McCurry
• The photograph is an undeniably powerful medium. Free from the constraints of language, and harnessing the unique qualities of a single moment frozen in time.
   – Steve McCurry

Quotes by Other Photographers

• I think the greatest photographers are the amateur photographers who do it because they love it. In that sense, I will always be an amateur.
   – John Sexton
• I photograph because I cannot yet do it. If I could, I would stop.
   – Josef Sudek
• There are three stages of development: copying, making variations on what was copied, and creating something new.
   – Jerry Ghionis
• Photography is not a sport. It has no rules. Everything must be dared and tried.
   – Bill Brandt
• A photographer's main instrument is his eyes. Strange as it may seem, many photographers choose to use the eyes of another photographer, past or present, instead of their own. Those photographers are blind.
   – Manuel Álvarez Bravo
• Luck is the attentive photographer's best teacher.
   – John Szarkowski
• If an image does not shock, it is nothing.
   – Marcel Duchamp
• Above all, life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference.
   – Robert Frank
• Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.
   – Garry Winogrand
• The photographer must photograph what he has never seen before. Or what he has never seen in that way before.
   – Lisette Model
• The photograph keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith; it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the metamorphosis of time.
   – Maurice Merleau-Ponty
• If a man makes 100 photographs in his lifetime, he is indeed a great photographer. For a photographer to leave behind 100 photographs is a great achievement.
   – Ara Güler
• Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
   – Scott Adams
• The public wants to be surprised, but by something familiar.
   – Tristan Bernard
• Like the fisherman or hunter, the photographer stakes everything on the improbable accident, and, strangely enough, wins more often than reasonable expectation would seem to promise.
   – Rudolf Arnheim
• If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough.
   – Robert Capa
• The photographer has a strange profession: he finds something before people have lost it.
   – Frank Carson
• Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper; the photographer begins with the finished product.
   – Edward Steichen
• 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
• 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
• Ultimately photography is about who you are. It's the truth in relation to yourself. And seeking truth becomes a habit.
   – Leonard Freed
• Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.
   – Peter Adams
• Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.
   – Marc Riboud
• The more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.
   – Robert Mapplethorpe

Quotes About Photography, Art, and Light from Other Well-Known People

Creative people have always existed. And although photography itself is a relatively young medium, the principles of composition, light, timing, observation, and visual thinking belong to a much wider artistic tradition. Here are several quotes from people outside photography, or from writers and artists whose ideas still connect strongly with the photographic way of seeing.

• An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.
   – Pablo Picasso
• To be a great artist, one need not be original. It is enough to repeat oneself each time differently.
   – Stanisław Jerzy Lec
• She is not beautiful whose ankle or arm wins praise, but she whose whole appearance leaves no admiration for the separate parts.
   – Seneca the Younger
• You have to systematically create confusion; it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life.
   – Salvador Dalí
• A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second, or one sixteenth, or one one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth. Snap your fingers; a snapshot's faster.
   – Salman Rushdie
• Like the fisherman or hunter, the photographer stakes everything on the improbable accident, and, strangely enough, wins more often than reasonable expectation would seem to promise.
   – Rudolf Arnheim
• The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, and familiar things new.
   – Samuel Johnson
  This quote is often rewritten for photography, but the original is about authorship, not photography.