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Photography Quotes

Browse 3249 quotes about Photography.

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Photography Quotes

“Look at the things around you, the immediate world around you. If you are alive, it will mean something to you, and if you care enough about photography, and if you know how to use it, you will want to photograph that meaningness. If you let other people's vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.”

PeopleIfsKnowsWorldWantLooksMeanEnoughUseCareCommonVisionKnow HowAliveAchievePhotographyPhotographWorthlessIf You CarePictorial
Author:Paul Strand
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“Your photography is a record of your living - for anyone who really sees. You may see and be affected by other people's ways, you may even use them to find your own, but you will have eventually to free yourself of them. That is what Nietzche meant when he said, 'I have just read Schopenhauer, now I have to get rid of him.' He knew how insidious other people's ways could be, particularly those which have the forcefulness of profound experience, if you let them get between you and your own personal vision.”

PeopleIfsWayMaySaidUseVisionRecordsPhotographyProfoundAffectedInsidiousFree YourselfPersonal Vision
Author:Paul Strand
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“I think the equipment you use has a real, visible influence on the character of your photography. You're going to work differently, and make different kinds of pictures, if you have to set up a view camera on a tripod than if you're Lee Friedlander with handheld 35 mm rangefinder. But fundamentally, vision is not about which camera or how many megapixels you have, it's about what you find important. It's all about ideas.”

IfsThinkingKindImportantIdeasDifferentRealCharacterUseViewsVisionInfluencePhotographyCamerasVisibleDifferent KindsEquipmentGoing To WorkTripods
Author:Keith Carter
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“I thought using three cameras was a lot better than one, because you could see where you were going, where you'd been, and all kinds of things - more like life. I think photography has colored our vision. We're now in an area where it might break something. I think this is a time. I feel it. I don't know whether I'll be here long enough to experience it. I've no plans to leave yet.”

ThinkingKnowsFeelsKindLongEnoughMightThreeVisionBreakPlansPhotographyAreasCamerasAll Kinds
Author:David Hockney
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“In my years of photography I have learned that many things can be sensed, seen, shaped, or resolved in a realm of quiet, well in advance of, or between, the actual clicking of shutters and the sloshing of films and papers in chemical solutions. I work to attain a state of heart, a gentle space offering inspirational substance that could purify one's vision. Photography, like music, must be born in the unmanifest world of the spirit.”

WorldYearsWellsHeartStatesFilmSpiritBornSpaceVisionQuietPaperPhotographySolutionsSubstanceGentleRealmsChemicalsOfferingI Have LearnedPapersShutters
Author:Paul Caponigro
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“My favorite part about costume designing is the artistry of the job. You meet with a director and a visionary to discuss ideas. You research the characters and figure out the components of their look through your own vision. You create a color palette for a film, television or stage medium and discuss it with the director of photography who then lights your colored subjects.”

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Author:Ruth E. Carter
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“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.”

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Author:David Bailey
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“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.”

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Author:Cecil Beaton
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“You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”

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Book:A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
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“Part of the reason that these attempts at explanation fail, I think, is that photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them the most fully truthful expression of their vision... as Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, 'You want me to say it worse?'”

ThinkingWantPersonsReasonArtistVisionFailingExpressionPhotographyPhotographerMediumsExplanationWant MeTruthfulFrostYou Want Me
Book:Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews
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“And if you can find out something about the laws of your own growth and vision as well as those of photography you may be able to relate the two, create an object that has a life of its own, which transcends craftsmanship. That is a long road, and because it must be your own road nobody can teach it to you or find it for you. There are no shortcuts, no rules.”

IfsWellsMayLongTwoAbleLawGrowthVisionTeachObjectsPhotographyPhotographerRelateShortcutsCraftsmanshipLong Road
Author:Paul Strand
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“The photographer's problem is to see clearly the limitations and at the same time the potential qualities of his medium, for it is precisely here that honesty no less than intensity of vision is the pre-requisite of a living expression. The fullest realization of this is accomplished without tricks of process or manipulation, through the use of straight photographic methods.”

UseProblemProcessQualityVisionHonestyExpressionPhotographyMethodPhotographerTricksMediumsRealizationLimitationAccomplishedManipulationIntensity
Book:Paul Strand: a Retrospective Monograph: The years 1915-1946
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“Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one's cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite.”

WritingMatterGivenNumbersVisionCasesPossibilityPhotographyStandingInfiniteBottomChessVisualsPortionsEditingRight TimeFiniteRight PlaceCones
Book:William Eggleston's Guide
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“One of the biggest mistakes a photographer can make is to look at the real world and cling to the vain hope that next time his film will somehow bear a closer resemblance to it...If we limit our vision to the real world, we will forever be fighting on the minus side of things, working only too make our photographs equal to what we see out there, but no better.”

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Author:Galen Rowell
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“There is no art which affords less opportunity to execute expression than photography. Everything is concentrated in a few seconds, when after perhaps an hours seeking, waiting, and hesitation, the photographer sees the realization of his inward vision, and in that moment he has one advantage over most arts - his medium is swift enough to record his momentary inspiration.”

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Author:Sadakichi Hartmann
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“The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and its object: dualities we can conceive but not perceive... Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.”

TwoDesireEvilVisionClassObjectsPhotographyPhotographInvisibleLandscapePerceiveGood And EvilGrantsWhy NotDestroyingDualityWindowpane
Author:Roland Barthes
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