Everyone knows the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. These are the words photographers themselves have used to describe the craft, from Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange to Annie Leibovitz and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Photography can be an up and down struggle, especially if you depend on it for income. Whether you’re a wedding photographer juggling clients or just growing your photography skills, it helps to hear how the greats thought about seeing, light, and timing.
Below are 135 photography quotes, grouped by theme. If you’re looking for something short to put in a caption, skip to the last section.
Table of contents
Quotes About Seeing
Most great photographers say the camera is the easy part. Learning to see is the real work.
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.
David Bailey
A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.
Dorothea Lange
One doesn’t stop seeing. One doesn’t stop framing. It doesn’t turn off and turn on. It’s on all the time.
Annie Leibovitz
I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.
Diane Arbus
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.
Elliott Erwitt
If I am successful, the photograph reveals the underbelly, the overlooked and the under appreciated.
Tom Baril
Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.
Matt Hardy
Photography is a way of putting distance between myself and the work which sometimes helps me to see more clearly what it is that I have made.
Andy Goldsworthy
There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.
Ansel Adams
Quotes About Moments and Time
A photograph freezes a moment that will never happen again, which is a big part of why the medium hooks people.
The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.
Andy Warhol
Taking an image, and freezing it, reveals how rich reality truly is.
Anonymous
With photography, you zero in; you put a lot of energy into short moments, and then you go on to the next thing.
Robert Mapplethorpe
It’s weird that photographers spend years or even a whole lifetime, trying to capture moments that added together, don’t even amount to a couple of hours.
James Lalropui Keivom
Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.
Dorothea Lange
Traditionally, photography is supposed to capture an event that has passed; but that is not what I’m looking for. Photography brings the past into the present when you look at it.
Julian Schnabel
A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you.
Brigitte Bardot
Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.
Marc Riboud
What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.
Karl Lagerfeld
A tear contains an ocean. A photographer is aware of the tiny moments in a person’s life that reveal greater truths.
Anonymous
What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
John Berger
No one moment is most important. Any moment can be something.
Garry Winogrand
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.
Aaron Siskind
Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.
Berenice Abbott
Photography to me is catching a moment which is passing, and which is true.
Jacques-Henri Lartigue
If you see something that moves you, and then snap it, you keep a moment.
Linda McCartney
To photograph is to hold one’s breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life.
Joan Miro
Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment – this very moment – to stay.
Sam Abell
Quotes About People and Portraits
Portrait and documentary photographers on connecting with the people in front of the lens.
If the photographer is interested in the people in front of his lens, and if he is compassionate, it’s already a lot. The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.
Eve Arnold
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.
Bruce Gilden
The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each to himself. And that is the most complicated thing on earth.
Edward Steichen
The camera makes you forget you’re there. It’s not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much.
Annie Leibovitz
It doesn’t matter if you’re photographing a porter in a market in Marrakech or you’re photographing the king of Morocco. You have the same sympathetic approach to everybody. You be nice to everybody, basically.
Albert Watson
When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I’d like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.
Annie Leibovitz
A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.
Edward Steichen
It’s one thing to make a picture of what a person looks like, it’s another thing to make a portrait of who they are.
Paul Caponigro
A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.
Annie Leibovitz
There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.
Robert Frank
The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don’t belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation.
Susan Meiselas
I like to photograph anyone before they know what their best angles are.
Ellen Von Unwerth
It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.
Alfred Eisenstaedt
It is a profound honour as a photographer to witness two people falling in love.
Jesh de Rox
My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.
Helmut Newton
When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their souls!
Ted Grant
Quotes About the Craft of Photography
Practical advice on light, gear, and getting better. If you want the hands-on version, see my travel photography tips.
When people ask me what equipment I use, I tell them my eyes.
Anonymous
In my photography, color and composition are inseparable. I see in color.
William Albert Allard
Computer photography won’t be photography as we know it. I think photography will always be chemical.
Annie Leibovitz
I never have taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse.
Diane Arbus
For me the printing process is part of the magic of photography. It’s that magic that can be exciting, disappointing, rewarding and frustrating all in the same few moments in the darkroom.
John Sexton
Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.
Yousuf Karsh
I don’t think there’s any such thing as teaching people photography, other than influencing them a little. People have to be their own learners. They have to have a certain talent.
Imogen Cunningham
For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
I always use my last week’s effort as my greatest inspiration. Instead of comparing myself to what photographers around me are doing, I’m always trying to beat last week’s effort.
Jerry Ghionis
Once the amateur’s naive approach and humble willingness to learn fades away, the creative spirit of good photography dies with it. Every professional should remain always in his heart an amateur.
Alfred Eisenstaedt
Photography is still a very new medium and everything must be tried and dared.
Bill Brandt
Look at lots of exhibitions and books, and don’t get hung up on cameras and technical things. Photography is about images.
Fay Godwin
Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography.
George Eastman
Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work.
Martin Parr
If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff.
Jim Richardson
Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.
Peter Adams
Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.
David Alan Harvey
If you want something to look interesting, don’t light all of it.
Joe McNally
I think that emotional content is an image’s most important element, regardless of the photographic technique. Much of the work I see these days lacks the emotional impact to draw a reaction from viewers, or remain in their hearts.
Annie Leibovitz
I find that with black and white I go straight to the person. In colour, I am more worried about the light, the clothes, the setting, etc. It is more complex. In black and white, it’s the person who is important.
Harry Gruyaert
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
Create your own visual style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.
Orson Welles
The whole nature of photography has changed with the advent of a camera in everybody’s hand.
Sally Mann
Quotes About Truth and Reality
Photographs feel like evidence, but the people who make them know it’s more complicated than that.
In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.
Alfred Stieglitz
With photography, I like to create a fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society’s natural prejudice and giving this a twist.
Martin Parr
Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.
Jean-Luc Godard
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
Diane Arbus
Photography is a small voice, at best, but sometimes one photograph, or a group of them, can lure our senses into awareness.
W. Eugene Smith
Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell.
Kim Edwards
With photography a new language has been created. Now for the first time it is possible to express reality by reality.
Ernst Haas
Quotes About Art and Why We Photograph
On photography as an art form, and why people keep picking up a camera.
I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.
Ken Burns
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.
Edward Steichen
A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective.
Irving Penn
Does not the very word ‘creative’ mean to build, to initiate, to give out, to act – rather than to be acted upon, to be subjective? Living photography is positive in its approach, it sings a song of life – not death.
Berenice Abbott
I find humor in many situations and things and I tend to make photographs that point out these things. We photograph according to our character.
Huy Nguyen
Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.
Imogen Cunningham
The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.
Elliott Erwitt
Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.
Paul Strand
An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s.
J. D. Salinger
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
Thomas Merton
Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.
Don McCullin
When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read the line of a poem twice.
Robert Frank
I have no fear of photography as long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell.
Edvard Munch
Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.
Berenice Abbott
People think because it’s photography it’s not worth as much, and because it’s a woman artist, you’re still not getting as much – there’s still definitely that happening. I’m still really competitive when it comes to, I guess, the male painters and male artists. I still think that’s really unfair.
Cindy Sherman
I went into photography because it seemed like the perfect vehicle for commenting on the madness of today’s existence.
Robert Mapplethorpe
The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.
Alfred Stieglitz
When I first became interested in photography, I thought it was the whole cheese. My idea was to have it recognized as one of the fine arts. Today I don’t give a hoot in hell about that. The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself.
Edward Steichen
We are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us.
Ralph Hattersley
I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.
Diane Arbus
Photography suits the temper of this age – of active bodies and minds. It is a perfect medium for one whose mind is teeming with ideas, imagery, for a prolific worker who would be slowed down by painting or sculpting, for one who sees quickly and acts decisively, accurately.
Edward Weston
My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.
Steve McCurry
I think landscape photography in general is somewhat undervalued.
Galen Rowell
I wish that all of nature’s magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed.
Annie Leibovitz
When I photograph, what I’m really doing is seeking answers to things.
Wynn Bullock
A photograph shouldn’t be just a picture, it should be a philosophy.
Amit Kalantri
Photography gives you the opportunity to use your sensibility and everything you are to say something about and be part of the world around you. In this way, you might discover who you are, and with a little luck, you might discover something much larger than yourself.
Peter Lindbergh
There is no question that photography has played a major role in the environmental movement.
Galen Rowell
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.
Harry Callahan
If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera.
Lewis Hine
As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs.
Sam Abell
Funny Photography Quotes
A few lighter ones, because photography doesn’t always have to be so serious.
Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure.
Tony Benn
Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.
Diane Arbus
A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.
George Bernard Shaw
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.
Diane Arbus
People don’t have time to wait for somebody to paint their portraits anymore. The money is in photography.
Robert Mapplethorpe
Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.
Ambrose Bierce
Photography is like sex. You know the ending. So how can you make it interesting?
Fer Juaristi
Short Photography Quotes for Captions
Short enough to use as an Instagram caption or under a print.
- “The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.” (Susan Sontag)
- “Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.” (Ansel Adams)
- “Photography helps people to see.” (Berenice Abbott)
- “In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.” (August Sander)
- “Only photograph what you love.” (Tim Walker)
- “The earth is art, the photographer is only a witness.” (Yann Arthus-Bertrand)
- “Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.” (Yousuf Karsh)
- “Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.” (Joe McNally)
- “A photograph is usually looked at, seldom looked into.” (Ansel Adams)
- “Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” (Susan Sontag)
- “All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.” (Richard Avedon)
- “Essentially what photography is is life lit up.” (Sam Abell)
- “The pictures are there, and you just take them.” (Robert Capa)
- “Photography is the story I fail to put into words.” (Destin Sparks)
- “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” (Ansel Adams)
- “One eye sees, the other feels.” (Paul Klee)
- “I think good dreaming is what leads to good photographs.” (Wayne Miller)
- “Photography is a love affair with life.” (Burk Uzzle)
- “Be yourself. Don’t copy anybody.” (Harry Gruyaert)
- “I don’t trust words. I trust pictures.” (Gilles Peress)
- “While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph.” (Lewis Hine)
- “A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.” (Eudora Welty)
- “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.” (Robert Capa)
Wrapping Up
The best of these quotes all point at the same idea: the camera matters a lot less than how you look at the world. Pick one that resonates and keep it in mind the next time you’re out shooting.
Want more motivational quotes? Check out my friend Ryan’s list of motivational quotes. Perfect for any business owner or freelancer.
Now quit reading this article and get out there and start taking pictures!
If I missed one of your favorites, let me know in the comments!
