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photography  ⌘  travel  ⌘  mountains  ⌘  stars  ⌘  flower  ⌘  book

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70+ powerful photography quotes

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Photography is the story I fail to put into words. ∼ Destin Sparks

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You don’t take a photograph. You ask quietly to borrow it. ∼ Unknown

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To the complaint, ‘There are no people in these photographs,’ I respond, There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer. ∼ Ansel Adams

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The Earth is art, the photographer is only a witness. ∼ Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Earth from Above

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It’s not enough to just own a camera. Everyone owns a camera. To be a photographer, you must understand, appreciate, and harness the power you hold! ∼ Mark Denman

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Suppose you’ve had that once-in-a-blue-moon bliss,
another’s body and the entire earth,
and end with just a photograph like this,
this – so this is all it’s worth…
∼ Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, A Photograph

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When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence. ∼ Ansel Adams

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Walter Mitty: When are you going to take it?
Sean O’Connell: Sometimes I don’t. If I like a moment, for me, personally, I don’t like to have the distraction of the camera. I just want to stay in it.
Walter Mitty: Stay in it?
Sean O’Connell: Yeah. Right there. Right here.
∼ James Thurber, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

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All we ever see of stars are their old photographs. ∼ Alan Moore, Watchmen

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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

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My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport. ∼ Steve McCurry

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Working a shot is the photographers’ way of refining the shot; to make an extraordinary imagery from the ordinary scene. It is just like a writer wandering about for the plot of story or a painter re-working his canvas for a finished outcome.  ∼ Shivanand Sharma

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In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality. ∼ Alfred Stieglitz

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In black and white you suggest, in color you state. ∼ Paul Outerbridge

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Color is descriptive. Black and white is interpretive. ∼ Elliott Erwitt

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Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like. ∼ David Alan Harvey

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To see in color is a delight for the eye but to see in black & white is a delight for the soul. ∼ Andri Cauldwell

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Black and white are the colours of photography. ∼ Robert Frank

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Essentially what photography is, is life lit up. ∼ Sam Abell

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We are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us. ∼ Ralph Hattersley

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It’s one thing to make a picture of what a person looks like, it’s another thing to make a portrait of who they are. ∼ Paul Caponigro

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The best photographs are the ones that feel touchable, inviting and real. ∼ Quinn Ballard

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Black and white photography erases time from the equation. ∼ Jason Peterson

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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

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The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera. ∼ Dorothea Lange

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A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people. ∼ Annie Leibovitz

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Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop. ∼ Ansel Adams

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A picture is the expression of an impression. If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it? ∼ Ernst Haas

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There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment. ∼ Robert Frank

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A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it. ∼ Edward Steichen

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You don’t take a photograph, you make it. ∼ Ansel Adams

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The photographer must be dedicated to the glory, the magic, and the mystery of light. ∼ Jacque- Henri Lartigue

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I don’t trust words. I trust pictures. ∼ Gilles Peress

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A tear contains an ocean. A photographer is aware of the tiny moments in a persons life that reveal greater truths. ∼ Unknown

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You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved. ∼ Ansel Adams

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The world may be color, but black & white transcends it. ∼ Abbas Attar

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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

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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

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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

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Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second. ∼ Marc Riboud

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The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do. ∼ Andy Warhol

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A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know. ∼ Diane Arbus

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Photography… offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution. ∼ Ansel Adams

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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

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Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still. ∼ Dorothea Lange

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When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not. ∼ Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

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I encourage playfulness and experimentation with both camera and subject. Never be satisfied with an obvious perspective. ∼ Michael Kenna

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What I love about black and white photographs is that they’re more like reading the book than seeing the movie. ∼ Jennifer Price

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Black and white photography does more to evoke an emotion and freeze a moment in time than any other medium. ∼ Bob Snell

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

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When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls! ∼ Ted Grant

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For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity. ∼ Henri Cartier-Bresson

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The eye should learn to listen before it looks. ∼ Robert Frank

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Taking an image, freezing a moment, reveals how rich reality truly is. ∼ Unknown

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What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce. ∼ Karl Lagerfeld

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A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away. ∼ E. Welty

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The picture that you took with your camera is the imagination you want to create with reality. ∼ Scott Lorenzo

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Photography is as much about what is left out of the frame as it is about what the photographer keeps inside the frame. ∼ Daryl Oh

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I do not document anything. I give an interpretation. ∼ Andre Kertesz

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A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second. ∼ Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

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I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them. ∼ Diane Arbus

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Light is the stuff which holds a photograph together; it breathes life, passion and emotion into your vision. ∼ Steve Coleman

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There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept. ∼ Ansel Adams

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Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell. ∼ Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter

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There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs. ∼ Ansel Adams

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Every photo I take is a piece of my life that I will never get back, but that I will be able to see again and again. ∼ Malcolm Flowers

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There are no bad pictures; that’s just how your face looks sometimes. ∼ Abraham Lincoln

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Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts. ∼ Garry Winogrand

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All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. ∼ Susan Sontag

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I think good dreaming is what leads to good photographs. ∼ Wayne Miller

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Sometimes I look with telephoto eyes, sometimes with wide-angle eyes. ∼ Alfred Eisenstaedt

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It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down…. ∼ Kate Morton, The House at Riverton

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Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst. ∼ Henri Cartier-Bresson

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Photography is a love affair with life. ∼ Burk Uzzle

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There’s not a special gauge or grading system to figure how touchable or inviting a photo is, and I love that. As technical and as heavily-edited that some shoots can be, I know we’ve landed at the best version of the photo when it simply feels real and helps the viewer feel like they’re walking into the space on a very normal yet perfectly beautiful, time-is-almost-slowed-down kind of day. ∼ Quinn Ballard

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Today everything exists to end in a photograph. ∼ Susan Sontag

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Light is the shape and play of my thought… my reason for being a photographer. ∼ Barbara Morgan

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Sometimes I arrive just when God’s ready to have somone click the shutter. ∼ Ansel Adams

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The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. ∼ Susan Sontag, On Photography

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We take photos as a return ticket to a moment otherwise gone. ∼ Katie Thurmes

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I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers. ∼ Mahatma Gandhi

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Photography is a litany of light. ∼ Moses Oliver

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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

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People spot a big black lens, and they worry about what they’re doing, or how their hair looks. Nobody see the person holding the camera. ∼ Erica O’Rourke, Torn

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photography  ⌘  travel  ⌘  mountains  ⌘  stars  ⌘  flower  ⌘  book

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