We all love an inspirational quote from time to time and over the years some of the best have been centered around the subject closest to our hearts, photography.
I’ve rounded up some of the best photography quotes here (some old, some new) and each of them manage to conjure up feelings of inspiration or motivation in their own way. Enjoy.
– “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
– “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 to the amateur is recreation, to the professional it is work, and hard work too, no matter how pleasurable it my be.” Edward Weston
– “The eye should learn to listen before it looks.” Robert Frank
– “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
– “Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” Henri Cartier-Bresson
– “There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.” Ansel Adams
– “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
– “My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.” Steve McCurry
– “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
– “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
– “A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you.” Brigitte Bardot
– “To the complaint, ‘There are no people in these photographs,’ I respond, There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.” Ansel Adams
– “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
– “The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.” Susan Sontag
– “The two most engaging powers of a photograph are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.” William Thackeray
– “To know ahead of time what you’re looking for means you’re then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting, and often false.” Dorothea Lange
– “Kodak sells film, but they don’t advertise film; they advertise memories.” Theodore Levitt
– “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
– “A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.” Edward Steichen
– “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
– “Photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future.” Sally Mann
– “If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff.” Jim Richardson
– “What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.” John Berger
– “It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.” David Bailey
– “I think that emotional content is an image’s most important element, regardless of the photographic technique. Much of the work I see these days lacks the emotional impact to draw a reaction from viewers, or remain in their hearts.” Anne Geddes
– “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
What’s your favourite photography quote? Is there anything you want to add? Let us know in the comments below.