RON HENGGELER

To take photographs means to recognize - simultaneously and within a fraction of a second - both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Before the people at large, and for that matter, the artists themselves, understand what photography really means, as I understand that term, it is essential for them to be taught the real meaning of art.

Alfred Stieglitz

The biggest cliche in photography is sunrise and sunset.

Catherine Opie

There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment. This kind of photography is realism. But realism is not enough - there has to be vision, and the two together can make a good photograph.

Robert Frank

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

Ansel Adams

Photography is a demanding action sport. The light can change so quickly. I often find myself sprinting so that I can catch the perfect light falling on a photogenic subject.

Steven Pinker

My photographs are not planned or composed in advance, and I do not anticipate that the onlooker will share my viewpoint. However, I feel that if my photograph leaves an image on his mind, something has been accomplished.

Robert Frank

With photography, you zero in; you put a lot of energy into short moments, and then you go on to the next thing.

Robert Mapplethorpe

Essentially what photography is is life lit up.

Sam Abell

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

Ansel Adams

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

Berenice Abbott

I have a vision of life, and I try to find equivalents for it in the form of photographs.

Alfred Stieglitz

Photography is a way of putting distance between myself and the work which sometimes helps me to see more clearly what it is that I have made.

Andy Goldworthy

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

Dorothea Lange

The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.

Edward Steichen

I like to feel that all my best photographs had strong personal visions and that a photograph that doesn't have a personal vision or doesn't communicate emotion fails.

Galen Rowell

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.

Elliot Erwitt

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

Mahatma Gandhi

Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.

Arnold Newman

Photographs aren't accounts of scrutiny. The shutter is open for a fraction of a second.

David Hockney

Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.

Ansel Adams

I don't think there's any such thing as teaching people photography, other than influencing them a little. People have to be their own learners. They have to have a certain talent.

Imogen Cunningham

Does not the very word 'creative' mean to build, to initiate, to give out, to act - rather than to be acted upon, to be subjective? Living photography is positive in its approach, it sings a song of life - not death.
Berenice Abbott

Traditionally, photography is supposed to capture an event that has passed; but that is not what I'm looking for. Photography brings the past into the present when you look at it.

Julian Schnabel

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

Richard Averdon

I think people are more apt to believe photographs, especially if it's something fantastic. They're willing to be more gullible. Sometimes they want fantasy.

Cindy Sherman

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

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

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

A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks.

Richard Averdon

Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

Susan Sontag

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

Camera lies all the time. It's all it does is lie, because when you choose this moment instead of this moment, when you... the moment you've made a choice, you're lying about something larger. 'Lying' is an ugly word. I don't mean lying. But any artist picks and chooses what they want to paint or write about or say. Photographers are the same.

Richard Averdon

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

I've always thought photography was a bit of an adventure, so to come home with the film, develop it, then look at the results has more of a sense of excitement.

Anton Corbijn

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

Edward Stieglitz

My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.

Richard Averdon

Photography to me is catching a moment which is passing, and which is true.

Jacques-Henri Lartigue

'Painting like a child' isn't a negative for me... it's something only great artists can really achieve. The childlike quality of some of Picasso's drawings is precisely what makes them so masterful and extraordinary; the ability to express complete visions, feelings and portraits through a continuous line.

Damien Hirst

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

Some photographers take reality... and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation.

Ansel Adams

Every viewer is going to get a different thing. That's the thing about painting, photography, cinema.

David Lynch

I always say that I don't want to be sentimental, that the photographs shouldn't be sentimental, and yet, I am conscious of my sentimentality.

Robert Frank

To me, the magic of photography, per se, is that you can capture an instant of a second that couldn't exist before and couldn't exist after. It's almost like a cowboy that draws his gun. You draw a second before or after, you miss and you're dead - not them. To me, photography's always like that.

Mario Testino

Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.

Susan Sontag

When I first became interested in photography, I thought it was the whole cheese. My idea was to have it recognized as one of the fine arts. Today I don't give a hoot in hell about that. The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself.

Edward Steichen

We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

As much as I love music, in my mind, photography is what makes me the happiest - that's for sure.

Julian Lennon

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

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Those who want to be serious photographers, you're really going to have to edit your work. You're going to have to understand what you're doing. You're going to have to not just shoot, shoot, shoot. To stop and look at your work is the most important thing you can do.

Annie Leibovitz

Any artist picks and chooses what they want to paint or write about or say. Photographers are the same.

Richard Averdon

Sometimes I enjoy just photographing the surface because I think it can be as revealing as going to the heart of the matter.

Annie Leibovitz

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

Martin Parr

I've always believed that photography is a way to shape human perception.

James Balog

Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.

Paul Strand

o 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

What I mean by photographing as a participant rather than observer is that I'm not only involved directly with some of the activities that I photograph, such as mountain climbing, but even when I'm not I have the philosophy that my mind and body are part of the natural world.

Galen Rowell

Photography is like a moment, an instant. You need a half-second to get the photo. So it's good to capture people when they are themselves.

Patrick Demarchelier

I've been working with the land for most of my life; walking it and photographing it. And I love it to bits.

Fay Godwin

Photography is the easiest medium with which to be merely competent. Almost anybody can be competent. It's the hardest medium in which to have some sort of personal vision and to have a signature style.

Chuck Close

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

Susan Sontag

One advantage of photography is that it's visual and can transcend language.

Lisa Kristine

Photography helps people to see.

Berenice Abbott

For a period of time, I carried cameras with me wherever I went, and then I realized that my interest in photography was turning toward the conceptual. So I wasn't carrying around cameras shooting stuff, I was developing concepts about what I wanted to shoot. And then I'd get the camera angle and do the job.

Leonard Nimoy

Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.

Ansel Adams

A lot of people think that when you have grand scenery, such as you have in Yosemite, that photography must be easy.

Galen Rowell

My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.

Richard Averdon

I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost - that is important.

Jacques Henri-Lartigue

Once the amateur's naive approach and humble willingness to learn fades away, the creative spirit of good photography dies with it. Every professional should remain always in his heart an amateur.

Alfred Eisenstaedt

The language that photography has is a formal language. Any photographer is doing something formal. If it's formal, then it must be an aesthetic way to communicate.

Sebastiao Salgado

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