1,962 Quotes About Photography

There is always a subjective aspect in landscape art, something in the picture that tells us as much about who is behind the camera as about what is in front of it.

If I like many photographers, and I do, I account for this by noting a quality they share - animation. They may or may not make a living by photography, but they are alive by it.

The job of the photographer, in my view, is not to catalogue indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope. This is not to say that he is unconcerned with the truth.

Landscape pictures can offer us, I think, three verities: geography, autobiography, and metaphor. Geography is, if taken alone, sometimes boring, autobiography is frequently trivial, and metaphor can be dubious. But taken together, as in the best work of people like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, the three kinds of information strengthen each other and reinforce what we all work to keep intact - the affection for life.

When photographers get beyond copying the achievements of others, or just repeating their own accidental first successes, they learn that they do not know where in the world they will find pictures. Nobody does. Each photograph that works is a revelation to its supposed creator.

The thing that keeps you scrambling over the rocks, risking snakes, and swatting at the flies is the view. It is only your enjoyment of and commitment to what you see, not to what you rationally understand, that balances the otherwise absurd investment of labor.

Your own photography is never enough. Every photographer who has lasted has depended on other peoples pictures too - photographs that may be public or private, serious or funny, but that carry with them a reminder of community.

The ambition of instantaneous photography... was that of preserving the spontaneity of action and avoiding any indication that the presence of the picture taker had a modifying influence on what was going on.

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.