Famous Quotes & Sayings

Joe McNally

No matter how much crap you gotta plow through to stay alive as a photographer, no matter how many bad assignments, bad days, bad clients, snotty subjects, obnoxious handlers, wigged-out art directors, technical disasters, failures of the mind, body, and will, all the shouldas, couldas, and wouldas that befuddle our brains and creep into our dreams, always remember to make room to shoot what you love. It's the only way to keep your heart beating as a photographer.

Joe McNally

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

Keira Knightley

Beauty is everywhere. And my photography came naturally without any particular inspirations growing up.

Nikki Sixx

Photography is an individual passion of mine. I don't get paid to do it, although people offer me money. I do it because I love it, and if there's no money attached, I don't have to do anything. It's my weekend away, my vacation, whether it's an hour or five hours or editing photos on my laptop in the middle of the night. It gives me relief from all the other stuff.

Nikki Sixx

My main camera is a Nikon D3. I use a French camera from the 1800s for wet plate photography, I use a Hasselblad sometimes. But to me the camera really doesn't matter that much. I don't have a preference for film or digital.

Margaret Bourke-White

We are in a privileged and sometimes happy position. We see a great deal of the world. Our obligation is to pass it on to others.

Ben Shahn

Of course I realize that photography is not the technical facility as much as it is the eye, and this decision that one makes for the moment at which you are going to snap, you know.

Minor White

Students were taught by doing.

Sebastiao Salgado

What I want is the world to remember the problems and the people I photograph. What I want is to create a discussion about what is happening around the world and to provoke some debate with these pictures. Nothing more than this. I don't want people to look at them and appreciate the light and the palate of tones. I want them to look inside and see what the pictures represent, and the kind of people I photograph.

Sebastiao Salgado

I work alone. Humans are incredible, because when you come alone, they will receive you, they accept you, they protect you, they give you all things that you need, and they teach you all things you must know. When you come with two persons or three persons, you have a group in front of them. They don't discuss with the new persons what is important to them...

Leonard Nimoy

I became involved in photography when I was about thirteen years old.

Kate Morton

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....

Peter Brook

One view of photography is that it is a zen-like act which captures reality with its pants down - so that the vital click shows the anatomy bare. In this, the photographer is invisible but essential. A computer releasing the shutter would always miss the special moment that the human sensibility can register. For this work, the photographer's instinct is his aid, his personality a hindrance.

Lauren Greenfield

My photography is often a sociological look at American culture, and it's been very well published in the U.K.

George Lucas

For 'Star Wars' I had to develop a whole new idea about special effects to give it the kind of kinetic energy I was looking for. I did it with motion-control photography.

Elliott Erwitt

I'm almost violent about that stuff - electronic manipulation of pictures. I think it's an abomination. I reject it all. I mean, it's OK for selling corn flakes or automobiles or for taking pimples out of Elizabeth Taylor's face, but it undermines the thing that photography is about, which is about observation and not about manipulation of images.

Elliott Erwitt

Quality doesn't mean deep blacks and whatever tonal range. That's not quality, that's a kind of quality. The pictures of Robert Frank might strike someone as being sloppy-the tone range isn't right and things like that-but they're far superior to the pictures of Ansel Adams with regard to quality, because the quality of Ansel Adams, if I may say so, is essentially the quality of a postcard. But the quality of Robert Frank is a quality that has something to do with what he's doing, what his mind is. It's not balancing out the sky to the sand and so forth. It's got to do with intention.

Elliott Erwitt

It's just seeing - at least the photography I care about. You either see or you don't see. The rest is academic. Anyone can learn how to develop. It's how you organize what you see into a picture.

Lou Reed

I mean, there are peripheral things I do, I do photography, I write plays, I have books published, but that's neither here not there.

James Nachtwey

Is it possible to put an end to a form of human behavior which has existed throughout history by means of photography? The proportions of that notion seem ridiculously out of balance. Yet, that very idea has motivated me.

James Nachtwey

The greatest statesmen, philosophers, humanitarians ... have not been able to put an end to war. Why place that demand on photography?

Edward Steichen

I was coming to realize that the real magician was light itself...

Edward Weston

Photography, not soft gutless painting, is best equipped to bore into the spirit of today.

Edward Weston

For photography is a way to capture the moment - not just any moment, but the important one, this one moment out of all time when your subject is revealed to the fullest - that moment of perfection which comes once and is not repeated.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

I'm inviting the spirits into my photography. It's an act of God.

Heinrich Heine

Photography is a witness against the mistaken opinion that art is an imitation of nature.

Gustave Flaubert

DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)

John Loengard

The fact is that the camera is literal if anything, which gives it something in common with a thermometer... Often the tension that exists between the pictorial content of a photograph and its record of reality is the picture's true beauty. There is sleight of hand in photography... you make the viewer think he's seeing everything while at the same time you make him realize he's not. I try to make my pictures seem reasonable and then, at the last minute, pull the rug from beneath the viewer's feet, very gently so there's a little thrill.

David LaChapelle

I was always painting when I was a kid. But then when I handled a camera when I was 17, that was it for me. I loved photography. I would work 4 or 5 hours a day. It was like a calling.

David LaChapelle

People say photographs don't lie, mine do.

David LaChapelle

I'm a photographer, period. I love photography, the immediacy of it. I like the craft, the idea of saying 'I'm a photographer.'

For the artist who practises photography, capturing the image is learning how to sketch on some medium, but is only half the challenge; learning how to print is applying a subjective pallet to that sketch, and completes the creative process.

David Hockney

There is nothing wrong with photography, if you don't mind the perspective of a paralysed Cyclops.