Photography Quotes

Would you believe it if someone tells you a photographer’s job makes for one of the toughest jobs in the world? You most probably wouldn’t, because for an amateur who knows not a thing or two about photography, it can seem like the easiest thing to master. This, however, is hardly true. Yes, comparatively speaking, photographers as professionals derive more pleasure from their job than most others do from theirs. However, this does not mean that a photographer does not have to work as hard as he or she does for that perfect shot. If you are looking to understand photography better, take the time to read on to discover a few quotes on photography. Post understanding better the quotes that are to follow, you are almost guaranteed to look at photography from an absolutely different angle. Looking at photography in fresh light will help you establish familiarity with the artistic nuances of the same.

• “A lot of people think that when you have grand scenery, such as you have in Yosemite, that photography must be easy.” - Galen Rowell
• “Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one's cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite.” - John Szarkowski
• “No matter how slow the film, spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer it has chosen.” - Minor White
• “To take photographs is to hold one's breath when all faculties converge in the face of fleeing reality. It is at that moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.” - Henri Cartier Bresson
• “Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality. It is or should be a significant document, a pene- trating statement, which can be described in a very simple term - selectivity.” - Berenice Abbott
• “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.” - Dorothea Lange
• “Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.” - Susan Sontag
• “The two most engaging powers of a photographer are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.” - W. Thackeray
• “What I feel is that the picture-taking process, anyway a greater part of it, is an intuitive thing. You can't go out and logically plan a picture, but when you come back, reason then takes over and verifies or rejects whatever you've done. So that's why I say that reason and intuition are not in conflict--they strengthen each other.” - Wynn Bullock
• “Pictures are wasted unless the motive power which impelled you to action is strong and stirring.” - Berenice Abbott
• Photography to the amateur is recreation, to the professional it is work, and hard work too, no matter how pleasurable it may be. - Edward Weston
• “Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.” – Matt Hardy