73 Of The Most Enlightening Photography Quotes To Help Spark Your Creative Ember

73 Of The Most Enlightening Photography Quotes To Help Spark Your Creative Ember

Photography, like many other creative fields, can sometimes feel extremely lonely and desolate. You need to be connected to your inner voice to be able to make good images and yet can’t stay away from all the good people in your life.

Some days you just feel burnt out, as if all the ingenious ideas you had before had vaporized into thin air.

No matter who you are, we have all faced the same situation. So here is a little help for you from the legends of the photography world. A few words of wisdom, which shall help you get out of the slump and charge up once more.

  • “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”
    Ansel Adams
  • “If your pictures are not good enough you are not close enough.”
    Robert Capa
  • “Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.”
    -David Alan Harvey

     

    73 inspirational photography quotes to bring back your spark
  • “The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.”
    -Andy Warhol
  • “Photography is the story I fail to put into words.”
    -Destin Sparks
  • “I didn’t choose photography, photography chose me.”
    -Gerardo Suter
  • Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation. 
    -Henri Cartier-Bresson
  • Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer – and often the supreme disappointment.
    Ansel Adams
  • Essentially what photography is life lit up.
    Sam Abell
  • Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.
  • Berenice Abbott
  • “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”
    Ansel Adams
  • “A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.”
    Annie Leibovitz
  • “A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.”
    Edward Steichen
    Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies. Diane Arbus
  • “Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.”
     Diane Arbus
  • “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 picture is in the box, I’m not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren’t cooks.”
    Henri Cartier-Bresson
  • “I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.”
    Diane Arbus
  • “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

    Character like a photograph developes in darkness
  • “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”
    Diane Arbus
  • “The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.”
    Elliott Erwitt
  • “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
  • “If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera.”
    Lewis Hine
  • “When people ask me what equipment I use – I tell them my eyes.”
    – Anon
  • “Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”
    Susan Sontag
  • “If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff.”
    Jim Richardson
  • “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
  • “Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.”
    – Dorothea Lange
  • “Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.”
    Imogen Cunningham
  • “Photography has no rules, it is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it is achieved.”
    Bill Brandt
  • “A photograph is like a recipe – the memory is the finished dish.”
    – Carrie Latet
  • “The eye should learn to listen before it looks.”
    – Robert Frank
  • “A photograph is usually looked at, seldom looked into.”
    – Ansel Adams
  • “When you photograph a face…you photograph the soul behind it.”
    – Jean-Luc Godard
  • “Whosoever possesses a camera should never know boredom.”
    – Wayne Gerard Trotman
  • “Some days you just get lucky… Other days you wait patiently for luck to happen”
    – Destin Sparks
  • “When I make a photograph I feel that I hold a piece of the universe in my hands.”
    – Paul Chaplo
    God creates the beauty. My camera and I are a witness. Mark Denman
  • “God creates the beauty. My camera and I are a witness.”
    – Mark Denman
  • “No matter how sophisticated the camera, the photographer is still the one that makes it.”
    – Doug Bartlow
  • “Sharpness is a bourgeois concept”
    – Henri Cartier-Bresson
  • “A photograph is a moral decision taken in one-eighth of a second.”
    – Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
  • “A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.”
    – Eudora Welty
  • “The way that light hits objects in life, three-dimensional objects before you photograph them, is really the story of photography.”
    – Rashid Johnson
  • “In photography, there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.”
    – Alfred Stieglitz
  • “My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.”
    – Steve McCurry

    Powerful Photography quotes which inspires
  • “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
  • “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
  • “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”
    – Ansel Adams
  • “I am not interested in shooting new things – I am interested to see things new.”
    – Ernst Haas
  • “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
    My photography is the result of being there at the right moment.Rene burri
  • “My photography is the result of being there at the right moment.”
    – Rene Burri
  • “The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.”
    – Steven Pinker
  • “Fear is the thing that prohibits a lot of photographers from reaching their full potential.”
    – Collin Pierson
  • “Perception isn’t reality, it’s the only reality.”
    – Amy and Jordan Demos
  • “Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.”
    – Henri Cartier-Bresson
  • “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
  • “You cannot possibly hit the shutter without leaving a piece of you in the image.”
    – Joe Buissink
  • “Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work.”
    – Martin Parr
  • “Photography has nothing to do with cameras.”
    – Lucas Gentry
  • “I think life is too short not to be doing something which you really believe in.”
    – Steve McCurry
  • “A tear contains an ocean. A photographer is aware of the tiny moments in a person’s life that reveal greater truths.”
    – Anon
  • “A good photograph is knowing where to stand.”
    -Ansel Adams
  • “A camera is a SAVE button for the mind’s eye.”
    -Roger Kingston
  • “Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.”
    — Peter Adams
  • “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
  • “If you see something that moves you, and then snap it, you keep a moment.”
    – Linda McCartney
  • “Which of the photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.”
    -Imogen Cunningham
    "Shoot today, so you are prepared to capture tomorrow" -Anonymous
  • “Shoot today, so you are prepared to capture tomorrow”
    -Anonymous
  • “The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”
    ― Susan Sontag, On Photography
  • “When the world asks “what was it like?” Only the photographer can say “See!”
    – Mark Denman
  • “A good photographer records; a great photographer reveals.”
    – Skyler Reid
  • “If you can smell the street by looking at the photo, it’s a street photograph.”
    – Bruce Gilden

I hope some of these quotes have helped you see the world of photography like it is, rather than what you hoped it would be like. The insights and the wisdom the words offer us are simply invaluable. I wonder if some of them resonated with you. If it did, share them with other people who may relate to it.

Keep shooting amazing.

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