Inspirational Quotes for Photographers
Inspirational quotes for photographers:
Even though I'm just an amateur photography enthusiast, I learned a lot just by reading these quotes. This list from Rick Sammon is a good reminder when developing one's eye for photography.
"Photography is a major force in explaining man to man." ~Edward Steichen
"We see, hear, smell, and taste many things without noticing them at the time." ~Carl Jung
"Photography has not changed since its origin except in its technical aspects, which for me, are not a major concern." ~Henri Cartier-Bresson
"Look for what you don't see." ~Rashid Elisha
"Creativity is a radical necessity, not a luxury." Jean Houston
"Learn to see, and then you'll know that there is no end to the new worlds of our vision." ~Carlos Castaneda
"A photograph is always seen in some context; physical, remembered, imagined." ~Rashid Elisha
"To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event." ~Henri Cartier-Bresson
"The hardest thing to see is what is in front of our eyes." ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere." ~Isaac Asimov
"Composition is the strongest way of seeing." ~Edward Weston
"Recording images serenity and beauty was a matter of devout
observance." ~Gordon Parks
"The so-called rules of composition are, in my mind, invalid,
irrelevant and immaterial." ~Ansel Adams
"I want my sitters to be noticed, not my work." Lord Snowden
"The eyes are the windows to the soul." ~Karsh of Ottawa
"I shut my eyes in order to see." ~Paul Gauguin
"Look at any landscape photograph. You see the shape of things, the mountains and trees and buildings, but not the sky." ~Kurt Koffka
"If I could tell the story in words, I would not have to lug around a camera." ~Lewis Hiene
"The soul never thinks without an image." ~Aristotle
"The best digital cameras have 6 to 16 million pixels. Our retina, consisting of rods and cones, has over 100 million sensors." ~Dr. Richard D. Zakia
"Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption." ~André Bazin
"Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask "how," while others of a more curious nature will ask "why." Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information." ~Man Ray
"Photography knows how to authenticate its misrepresentations." ~Mason Cooley
"It's a funny thing about life. If you refuse to accept anything but the best, you often get it." ~Somerset Maugham
"The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance." ~Ansel Adams
"The artist is a receptacle for the emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web." ~Pablo Picasso
"I don't care if you make a print on a bath mat, just as long as it is a good print." ~Edward Weston
"One photo out of focus is a mistake, ten photos out of focus are an experimentation, one hundred photos out of focus are a style." ~Anonymous
"I hear I forget. I see I remember. I do I understand." ~Confucius
"I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the
difference." ~Robert Frost
"A painter paints his pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. We provide the music and you provide the silence." ~Leopold Stokowski
"We can try to avoid making choices by doing nothing, but even that is a decision." ~Gary Collins
"Photography is like art because, like painting, it seeks beauty." ~Julia Margaret Cameron.
"Balance is the enemy of art." ~Richard Eyre
"Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals." ~Susan Sontag
"Practice is everything." ~Periander (Often misquoted as "Practice makes perfect.")
"Perception is personal. We see what we see." ~Richard Fahey
"There is no audience as far as I am concerned. I am the audience." ~Joel Meyerowitz
"You know... that a blank wall is an appalling thing to look at. The wall of a museum - a canvas - a piece of film -- or a guy sitting in front of a typewriter. Then, you start out to do something - that vague thing called creation. The beginning strikes awe within you." ~Edward Steichen
"Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better." ~John Updike
"If you just take a picture of what's there, it destroys the mystery, the magic." ~Art Kane
"One's mind has a way of making itself up in the background, and it suddenly becomes clear what one means to do." ~A. C. Benso
"The art of creating is not entirely a rational and conscious one." ~Salman Rushdie
"The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition." ~W. H. Auden
"It is imagination that gives shape to the universe." ~Barry Lopez
"The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it." ~Jean Paul Sartre
"The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera." ~Dorothea Lange
"Art is a line that makes us realize the truth." ~Pablo Picasso
"If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write all the books in the British Museum." ~Sir Arthur Eddington
"With all art expression, when something is seen, it is a vivid
experience, sudden, compelling and inevitable." ~Ansel Adams
"To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event." ~Henri Cartier-Bresson
"I am not interested in nature; I'm interested in my own nature." ~Arnold Sisken
"If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its
functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude." ~Charles Baudelaire
"Vertical columns, such as those found in Greek and Roman temples, look parallel from the ground because they are wider at the top than at the bottom." ~Joanne Kemp
"Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own
nature into his pictures." ~Henry Ward Beecher
"Not every light is true light. To the wise, the light of truth is
light itself." ~Tiruvalluvar
"Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training." ~Anna Freud
"To see an object in space means to see it in context." ~Rudolf Arnheim
Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second. ~Jean-Luc Godard
"The more one looks, the more one sees. And the more once sees, the better one knows where to look." ~Anonymous
"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." ~Edward Steichen
"God is in the details." ~Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
"I don't know what you could say about a day in which you have seen four beautiful sunsets." ~John Glenn
"Between the photographer and the subject there has to be a distance. The camera may intrude, trespass, distort, exploit." ~Susan Sontag
"Photography is a major force in explaining man to man." ~Edward Steichen
"Don't you love it when some incredibly beautiful woman like Linda Evans or Cindy Crawford tells is that the real beauty secret if finding your inner light? No shit." ~Marianne Williamson
"The street is full of humiliations to the proud." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The magic of photography is metaphysical. What you see in the photograph isn't what you saw at the time. The real skill of photography is organized visual lying." ~Terence Donovan
"A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know." ~Diane Arbus
"We can only recognize what we know." ~E.H. Gombrich
"The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till the other is ready, and it may be along time before they get off." ~Henry David Thoreau
"Light is my inspiration, my paint and brush. It is as vital as the
model herself. Profoundly significant, it caresses the essential
superlative curves and lines. Light I acknowledge as the energy upon which all life on this planet depends." ~Ruth Bernhard
"If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that ... I believe in what I do, and I'll say it." ~John Lennon
"Fun has a scared dimension." ~Adrian Diaz
"A picture is worth a thousand words; a slide show is both." ~Anonymous
"It's never to late to be what you could have been." ~George Eliot
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that don't work." ~Thomas Alva Edison
"The limits of your language are the limits of your world." ~Ludwig Wittgenstein
"I am still learning." ~Michelangelo
"Why don't you write books people can read?" ~Nora Joyce, to her husband James
"Travelers, there is no path, paths are made by walking." ~Antonio Machado
