Art Photography Quotes

Fine-art photography is a very small world associated with galleries, museums, and university art programs. It's not like rock music; the products of this world have never been widely seen because the artists are often exploring things that are not already coded in general consciousness. It's not that photographers don't want to be famous, it's just that very few of the views from the edges of culture make the mainstream. Ansel Adams was an exception.

What inspires me still: travel, art, photography, my kids, the places I haven't been to yet.

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. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down.

I am interested in computers and technology, and art, photography, and design.

When I was at college, the idea of fashion was more immediate to me, whereas art photography, the depth of it, was a different thing. Storytelling - fanciful storytelling - can only be told through fashion photography. It's the perfect way to play with fantasy and dreams.

The very act of representation has been so thoroughly challenged in recent years by postmodern theories that it is impossible not to see the flaws everywhere, in any practice of photography. Traditional genres in particular-journalism, documentary studies, and fine-art photography-have become shells, or forms emptied of meaning.

Real photography is a wonderfully inclusive, democratic medium, whereas art photography is more often a private pursuit by conmen.

Black-and-white photography, which I was doing in the very early days, was essentially called art photography and usually consisted of landscapes by people like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. But photographs by people like Adams didn't interest me.

... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.

There are no bad pictures; that's just how your face looks sometimes.

A photograph is neither taken or seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.

Photography to the amateur is recreation, to the professional it is work, and hard work too, no matter how pleasurable it my be.

Maybe because it's entirely an artist's eye, patience and skill that makes an image and not his tools.

I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.

A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.

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.

Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

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.

Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind.

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

There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

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.

Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I'm going to take tomorrow.

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.

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.

The visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable.

Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.

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.

Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.

You don't make a photograph just with a camera

What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.

The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.

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

I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do - that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.

It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.

Photography is a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing. The contest can be held anywhere.

What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

Art photography, although long since legitimized by all the conventional discourses of fine art, seems destined perpetually to recapitulate all the rituals of the arriviste. Inasmuch as one of those rituals consists of the establishment of suitable ancestry, a search for distinguished bloodlines, it inevitably happens that photographic history and criticism are more concern with notions of tradition and continuity than with those of rupture and change.

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.

I wish more people felt that photography was an adventure the same as life itself and felt that their individual feelings were worth expressing. To me, that makes photography more exciting.

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

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown.

The camera cannot lie, but it can be an accessory to untruth.