Grab your camera and get ready. These photography quotes will help you appreciate photos like never before.
While photos were once about taking portraits or landscapes, now you can use this media to capture anything you want to remember.
From casual snaps for family albums or social media to formal art exhibits, photography is an exciting art form with something for everyone to enjoy and appreciate.
Photographs are powerful reminders you of special events or days, and bring us back to the feelings and sounds of the moments they capture.
So here are some classic photography quotes in case that’s how you like to be artistic.
Top 10 Photography Quotes
Photography is the story I fail to put into words.
Destin Sparks
You don’t take a photograph, you make it.
Ansel Adams
Photography is the art of making memories tangible.
Destin Sparks
Essentially what photography is is life lit up.
Sam Abell
A good photographer records; a great photographer reveals.
David Glen Larson
Photography is truth.
Jean-Luc Godard
The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.
Steven Pinker
To me, photography must suggest, not insist or explain.
Brassai
Quotes about Photography
Photography is the recording of strangeness and beauty with beguiling precision.
Sebastian Smee
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
Susan Sontag
The earth is art, the photographer is only a witness.
Yann Arthus-Bertrand
Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work.
Martin Parr
We are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us.
Ralph Hattersley
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
When I photograph, what I’m really doing is seeking answers to things.
Wynn Bullock
Seeing is not enough; you have to feel what you photograph.
Andre Kertesz
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
Photography is my passion, the search for truth, my obsession.
Alfred Stieglitz
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.
Kate Morton
In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.
Alfred Stieglitz
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
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
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
Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.
Steven Pinker
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
I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.
Diane Arbus
Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.
Dorothea Lange
Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real.
Ansel Adams
Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.
Duane Michals
Photography is a medium in which if you don’t do it then, very often you don’t do it at all, because it doesn’t happen twice.
Paul Strand
In the world of photography, you get to share a captured moment with other people.
James Wilson
Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.
Paul Strand
In photography, there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.
August Sander
One advantage of photography is that it’s visual and can transcend language.
Lisa Kristine
Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Photography is an itch that won’t go away. No matter how much you scratch it.
Dara McGrath
Part of the role of photography is to exaggerate, and that is an aspect that I have to puncture. I do that by showing the world as I really find it.
Martin Parr
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
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
Photography is a means by which we learn to see the ordinary.
David Bailey
The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet.
Imogen Cunningham
Photography Quotes on Contrast
Black and white are the colors of photography. To me they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected.
Robert Frank
There’s something strange and powerful about black-and-white imagery.
Stefan Kanfer
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
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
Quit trying to find beautiful objects to photograph. Find the ordinary objects so you can transform it by photographing it.
Morley Baer
With photography, a new language has been created. Now, for the first time, it is possible to express reality by reality. We can look at an impression as long as we wish, we can delve into it and, so to speak, renew past experiences at will.
Ernst Haas
Quotes about Photos
When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.
Ansel Adams
A photograph shouldn’t be just a picture, it should be a philosophy.
Amit Kalantri
Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.
Matt Hardy
A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.
Ansel Adams
There is one thing the photo must contain – the humanity of the moment.
Robert Frank
Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down.
Kate Morton
What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.
Karl Lagerfeld
There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.
Robert Frank
Photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future.
Sally Mann
Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.
Ambrose Bierce
All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.
Richard Avedon
I think good dreaming is what leads to good photographs.
Wayne Miller
Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.
Imogen Cunningham
We are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us.
Ralph Hattersley
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
Twelve significant photographs in one year is a good crop.
Ansel Adams
Picture Quotes
You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life.
Joan Miro
A very subtle difference can make the picture or not.
Annie Leibowitz
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
The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.
Andy Warhol
The picture that you took with your camera is the imagination you want to create with reality.
Scott Lorenzo
A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.
Diane Arbus
Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.
Marc Riboud
There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.
Ansel Adams
A good snapshot keeps a moment that s gone from running away.
Eudora Welty
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
There are no bad pictures; that’s just how your face looks sometimes.
Abraham Lincoln
The more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.
Robert Mapplethorpe
I never have taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse.
Diane Arbus
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
Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.
Diane Arbus
Camera Quotes
A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.
Edward Steichen
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
Dorothea Lange
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
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 Leibowitz
It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera… they are made with the eye, heart, and head.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.
Orson Welles
The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?
Edward Weston
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
It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.
Alfred Eisenstaedt
Kodak sells film, but they don’t advertise film; they advertise memories.
Theodore Levitt
Photography is not about cameras, gadgets and gizmos. Photography is about photographers. A camera didn’t make a great picture any more than a typewriter wrote a great novel.
Peter Adams
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
There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph.
Robert Heinecken
Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.
Yousuf Karsh
My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.
Steve McCurry
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
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 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
Photography is definitely the form of artistic expression that has been around for the least amount of time, but that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t had a profound impact on the way we experience and record history.
With the availability of smartphones and their tiny, high quality cameras, photography is actually one of the most accessible means of creating and enjoying art today.
We hope these great photography quotes inspire you to see photos in a different way and maybe snap a few of your own.