50 Awesome Inspirational Photography Quotes

As many of you who read my blog will notice, I love using quotes to make a point. The funny thing is that I rarely quote photographers. After noticing that, I thought it was time to remedy this and share 50 of my all time favorite photography quotes.

Hope you enjoy them!

Leave your favorite photography related quotes in the comments. I’d love to read them.        

1- “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

2- “Photography is a language more universal than words.”

~ Minor White

3- “Photography is for me, a spontaneous impulse that comes from an ever-attentive eye, which captures the moment and its eternity.”

~ Henri Cartier Bresson

4- “Kodak sells film, but they don’t advertise film; they advertise memories.”

~ Theodore Levitt

5- “The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it.”

~ Ansel Adams

6- “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

7- “Best wide-angle lens? Two steps backward. Look for the ‘ah-ha’.”

~ Ernst Haas

8- “Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.”

~ Cecil Beaton

9- “You don’t take a photograph. You ask quietly to borrow it.”

~ Unknown

10- “If the photographer is interested in the people in front of his lens, and if he is compassionate, it’s already a lot. The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.”

~ Eve Arnold

11- “Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.”

~ Marc Riboud

12- “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”

~ Diane Arbus

13- “There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.”

~ Ansel Adams

14- “When people ask me what equipment I use ~ I tell them my eyes.”

~ Anonymous

15- “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

16- “Skill in photography is acquired by practice and not by purchase.”

~ Percy W. Harris

17- “Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.”

~ Yousuf Karsh

18- “The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.”

~ Andy Warhol

19- “The best camera is the one that’s with you.”

~ Chase Jarvis

20- “Buying a camera doesn’t make you a photographer. It makes you a camera owner.”

~ Author Unknown

21- “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

22- “Anyone can shoot chaos. But the most perceptive photographers can make compelling pictures out of uninteresting moments.”

~ Alex Tehrani

23- “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

24- “I never have taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse.”

~ Diane Arbus

25- “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

26- “A good photographer records; a great photographer reveals.”

~ Skyler Reid

27- “If you can smell the street by looking at the photo, it’s a street photograph.”

~ Bruce Gilden

28- “I guess I’ve shot about 40,000 negatives and of these, I have about 800 pictures I like.”

~ Harry Callahan

29- “Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.”

~ Duane Michals

30- “Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.”

~ Matt Hardy

31- “What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.”

~ Karl Lagerfeld

32- “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

33- “Life is like a camera. Just focus on what’s important and capture the good times, develop from the negatives and if things don’t work out, just take another shot.”

~ Unknown

34- “Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.”

~ Peter Adams

35- “If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff.”

~ Jim Richardson

36- “I am not interested in rules or conventions. Photography is not a sport.”

~ Bill Brandt

37- “You just have to live and life will give you pictures.”

~ Henri Cartier Bresson

38- “It doesn’t matter if you’re photographing a porter in a market in Marrakech or you’re photographing the king of Morroco. You have the same sympathetic approach to everybody. You be nice to everybody, basically.”

~ Albert Watson

39- “When you photograph people in color you photograph their clothes. When you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their soul!”

~ Ted Grant

40- “If you are out there shooting, things will happen for you. If you’re not out there, you’ll only hear about it.”

~ Jay Maisel

41- “Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.”

~ Arnold Newman

42- “A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.”

~Dorthea Lange

43- “Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.”

~ Imogen Cunningham

44- “It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.”

~ Alfred Eisenstaedt

45- “The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.”

~ Edward Weston

46- “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

47- “Photography is a strong tool, a propaganda device, and a weapon for the defense of the environment…and therefore for the fostering of a healthy human race and even very likely for its survival.”

~ Eliot Porter

48- “The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each to himself. And that is the most complicated thing on earth.”

~Edward Steichen

49- “What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.”

~ John Berger

50- “My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.”

~ Steve McCurry

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Ken Kaminesky is a Canadian lifestyle and travel photographer. Follow him in his quest to take over the world, one photo at a time! Ken Kaminesky Travel Photography Blog