Street Photography Quotes

It's neither our culture nor our race which interconnects us. It's Street Photography.

If you can smell the street by looking at the photo, it's a street photograph

I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.

Photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the photo as a judgment that the photograph is good

I suspect it is for one's self-interest that one looks at one's surroundings and one's self. This search is personally born and is indeed my reason and motive for making photographs.

I love the people I photograph. I mean, they're my friends. I've never met most of them or I don't know them at all, yet through my images I live with them.

Since I'm inarticulate, I express myself with images.

All the technique in the world doesn't compensate for the inability to notice.

When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.

I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photography—that it is purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in the with the history of painting and other art forms.

Seeing is not enough; you have to feel what you photograph

If I saw something in my viewfinder that looked familiar to me, I would do something to shake it up.

Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.

I have always felt that a lot of the most interesting work, not just mine but other people's, falls into [the] nether area, somewhere between the worlds of documentary and photojournalism (two very vague words) and the world of art. I think a lot of street photography falls into this nether area.

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

Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.

The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.

Street photography is art and if art is a crime, please God, forgive me.

Street Photography is like fishing. Catching the fish is more exciting than eating it.

During the work, you have to be sure that you haven't left any holes, that you've captured everything, because afterwards it will be too late.

Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving.

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.

Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.

My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.

There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.

Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.

If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough.

Never boss people around. It's more important to click with people than to click the shutter.

The eye should learn to listen before it looks.

When you photograph people in color you photograph their clothes. When you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their soul!

Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn't look like somebody else's work.

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

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.

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

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.

You don't make a photograph just with a camera

The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don't have to explain things with words.

Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.

A good photograph is knowing where to stand.

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

Nothing happens when you sit at home. I always make it a point to carry a camera with me at all times...I just shoot at what interests me at that moment.

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

I have problems with a lot of photography, particularly street photography and photojournalism - objectifying the other, finding the contempt and exoticism that you might feel within yourself or toward yourself and projecting it out to others. There can be an abusive power to photography, too.