These are some of the most interesting thoughts of photographers on photography, expressed as quotes. Some of them I agree with, some I don’t – but they are all thought provoking. I restricted myself to one quote per photographer, which in many cases, such as Ansel Adams and Henri Cartier-Bresson, was difficult. In the next post I will collect the thoughts of other creatives such as artists, film makers and writers on the same topic.
Ansel Adams – Landscape Photographer
“Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.”
William Albert Allard – Documentary Photographer
“What’s really important is to simplify. The work of most photographers would be improved immensely if they could do one thing: get rid of the extraneous. If you strive for simplicity, you are more likely to reach the viewer. ”
Diane Arbus – Documentary Photographer
“I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favourite thing is to go where I’ve never been.”
Richard Avedon – Fashion & Portrait Photographer
“A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth. ”
David Bailey – Fashion & Portrait Photographer
“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.”
Margaret Bourke-White – Photojournalist & War photographer
“If anyone gets in my way when I’m making a picture, I become irrational. I’m never sure what I am going to do, or sometimes even aware of what I do – only that I want that picture.”
Brassai – Photographer, Sculptor, Writer & Film Maker
Andri Cauldwell – Photographer
Robert Capa – War Photographer
“If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.”
Henri Cartier-Bresson – Photographer & Photojournalist
“To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.”
Robert Frank – Photographer & Documentary Filmmaker
“Black and white are the colours of photography. To me they symbolise the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected.”
Nan Goldin – Photographer
Ted Grant – Photographer
“When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their souls!”
Ernst Haas – Photojournalist & Photographer
“There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.”
William Klein – Artist, Film Maker, Graphic Designer, Fashion & Street Photographer
“My photographs are the fragments of a shapeless cry that tries to say who knows what… What would please me most is to make photographs as incomprehensible as life.”
Dorothea Lange – Photographer & Photojournalist
“Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.”
Paul Outerbridge – Photographer
“One very important difference between color and monochromatic photography is this: in black and white you suggest; in color you state. Much can be implied by suggestion, but statement demands certainty… absolute certainty.”
Trent Parke – Photojournalist & Street Photographer
“I am forever chasing light. Light turns the ordinary into the magical.”
Martin Parr – Documentary Photographer
“There are two parts to the process: taking the picture and finding ways of using it.”
Dominic Rouse – Photographer
“Colour is everything, black and white is more.”
Sebastiao Salgado – Social Documentary Photographer & Photojournalist
“I looked through a lens and ended up abandoning everything else.”
August Sander – Portrait & Documentary Photographer
“In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.”
Alfred Stieglitz – Photographer & Modern Art Promoter
“In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.”
John Swarkowski – Photographer, Curator, Historian & Critic
Edward Weston – Landscape, Still Life & Portrait Photographer
“Anything that excites me for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual.”
Joel Peter Witkin – Photographer
“I wanted my photographs to be as powerful as the last thing a person sees or remembers before death.”