Inspirational Quotes about Photography- An Amazing Collection

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If you find yourself lacking motivation to continue capturing images (a struggle that all artists face at times) if you’re seeking that extra push to reignite your passion for photography, or even if you simply want to indulge in more inspirational quotes about photography, then you’ve come to the perfect spot.

Although drawing inspiration from the remarkable work of other photographers can be helpful, it may inadvertently confine the boundaries of your own creativity. By delving into quotes from renowned photographers who have experienced similar challenges in their lives, you can infuse yourself with an added surge of energy and inspiration.

I have compiled a collection of the most inspirational photography quotes of all time from some of the most famous artists, photographers, and writers in history. I really wish that their quotes would inspire you to work harder and become the photographer you have always wanted to be.

 

 

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

Karl Lagerfeld

 

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

Andy Warhol

 

I am forever chasing light. Light turns the ordinary into the magical.

Trent Parke

 

You know, I really don’t think you learn from teachers. You learn from work. I think what you learn, really, is how to be – you have to be your own toughest critic, and you only learn that from work, from seeing work.

Garry Winogrand

 

Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.

– Peter Adams

 

 

Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

 

I think life is too short not to be doing something which you really believe in.

Steve McCurry

 

The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.

Elliott Erwitt

 

It can be a trap of the photographer to think that his or her best pictures were the ones that were hardest to get.

Timothy Allen

 

The pictures are there, and you just take them.

Robert Capa

 

 

If I have any ‘message’ worth giving to a beginner it is that there are no shortcuts in photography.

Edward Weston

 

All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

Richard Avedon

 

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life

Joan Miro

 

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.

Jonathan Swift

 

If Photoshop is the answer, you’re asking the wrong question

Dean Farrell

 

 

Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man.

Edward Steichen

 

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

Susan Sontag

 

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

 

The world moves fast, changing everything around us with each new day. Photography is a gift that can keep us in a moment forever, blissfully eternal.

Ali Novak

 

A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.

George Bernard Shaw

 

 

Seeing is not enough; you have to feel what you photograph

Andre Kertesz

 

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

 

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

Diane Arbus

 

The two most engaging powers of a photograph are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.

William Thackeray

 

I think good dreaming is what leads to good photographs.

Wayne Miller

 

 

There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.

Ernst Haas

 

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

Diane Arbus

 

If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera.

Lewis Hine

 

A camera is a SAVE button for the mind’s eye.

Roger Kingston

 

 

To me, photography must suggest, not insist or explain.

Brassai

 

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

Ralph Hattersley

 

I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.

Diane Arbus

 

You cannot possibly hit the shutter without leaving a piece of you in the image.

Joe Buissink

 

 

There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.

Ernst Haas

 

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

 

You don’t take pictures, they take you.

Jay Maysel

 

A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective.

Irving Penn

 

The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it!

Ansel Adams

 

For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.

Diane Arbus

 

 

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.

Dorothea Lange

 

To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye, and the heart.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

 

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

 

No, you don’t shoot things. You capture them. Photography means painting with light. And that’s what you do. You paint a picture only by adding light to the things you see.

Katja Michael

 

 

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

Robert Frank

 

It’s weird that photographers spend years or even a whole lifetime, trying to capture moments that added together, don’t even amount to a couple of hours.

James Lalropui Keivom

 

Sometimes one waits too long for the perfect moment before snapping the picture. You never realize that you needed was to change perspective.

Miguel Syjuco

 

The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.

Orson Welles

 

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

Scott Lorenzo

 

For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

 

The eye should learn to listen before it looks.

Robert Frank

 

 

There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. 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. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

 

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

 

People say photographs don’t lie, mine do.

David LaChapelle

 

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

Steve McCurry

 

What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.

Roland Barthes

 

 

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

 

A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective.

Irving Penn

 

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

 

The only photographer you should compare yourself to is the one you used to be.

Anonymous

 

A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.

Eudora Welty

 

Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

 

 

Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn’t look like somebody else’s work.

William Klein

 

Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work.

Martin Parr

 

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 Erwin

 

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

Dorothea Lange

 

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.

Jon Paul Caponigro

 

 

If you photograph for a long time, you get to understand such things as body language. I often do not look at people I photograph, especially afterward. Also when I want a photo, I become somewhat fearless, and this helps a lot. There will always be someone who objects to being photographed, and when this happens, you move on.

Martin Parr

 

The golden rule is working fast. As for framing, composition, focus – this is no time to start asking yourself questions: you just have to trust your intuition and the sharpness of your reflexes.

Jacques-Henri Lartigue

 

Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.

Alfred Stieglitz

 

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

 

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

 

 

It’s important to take bad pictures. The bad ones have to do with what you have never done before. They can make you recognize something you had not seen in a way that will make you recognize it when you see it again.

Diane Arbus

 

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

Imogen Cunningham

 

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

 

Photography is the story I fail to put into words.

Destin Sparks

 

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

Edward Steichen

 

Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.

Berenice Abott

 

 

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

Bruce Gilden

 

A camera alone does not make a picture. To make a picture you need a camera, a photographer and above all a subject. It is the subject that determines the interest of the photograph.

– Man Ray

 

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

 

My interest in photography is not to capture an image I see or even have in my mind, but to explore the potential of moments I can only begin to imagine.

Lois Greenfield

 

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

 

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

Dorothea Lange

 

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed the article if you have any questions just post below & I will be happy to answer you.

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4 Comments

  • This is a very good post with a number of very nice quotes too for us who are into photography. I feel like the quotes here are really uplifting because the truth is that sometimes, photography can be tiring and inspiration just gets lost. I will bookmark this post to use it when I need some inspiration. Thanks!

  • wow, this is just so magnificent. I have never thought that there are quotes online that are this beautiful about photography. I love taking pictures but not professionally and Ben at that, I still find it hard to get motivated sometimes. Your post has really opened my eyes to a couple of things. Of all the quotes here, I really like the one that says.All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality. That really hit a spot on me.

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