Photography Art Quotes

Anyday, one can walk down the street in a big city and see a thousand people. Any photographer can photograph these people - but very few photographers can make their prints not only reproductions of the people taken, but a comment upon them - or more, a comment upon their lives - or more still, a comment upon the social order that creates these lives.

Family photos, pictures of groups, those are truely wonderful. And they are just as good as the old masters, just as rich and just as beautifully composed (what does that mean anyway).

Is photography an art? There is no point in trying to find out if it is an art. Art is old-fashioned. We need something else.

Mostly the subject of the photograph, which can be anyone really, coming down the street - someone that has no idea. "Heroism" in photography, just like in a novel, is for everyone.

The greatest work of art about New York? The question seems nebulous. The city's magic and majesty are distilled in the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand.

The desire to discover, the desire to move, to capture the flavor, three concepts that describe the art of photography.

The work I care about is terribly simple. I observe. I try to entertain. But above all I want my pictures to be emotional. Little else interests me in photography.

It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium.

I believe in the relation between photography and music; And thats my inspiration.

I think the camera is a wonderful machine, don't you? And not to take photographs in this century is crazy.

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.

The herculean task of a photographer is to capture a momentary frame as beautiful in reality, as it would be in a dream.

Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.

The problem is almost everybody is just recording the world with home photographic toys, not doing metaphor or ideas. We have a photographic culture that's not conditioned to think in terms of symbol.

Photography today appears to be in a state of flight... The familiar is made strange, the unfamiliar grotesque. The amateur forces his Sundays into a series of unnatural poses.

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.

The easy bit is picking up a camera and pointing and shooting. But then you have to decide what it is you’re trying to say and express.

The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.

Making poetry with a camera - that's the essence of what I do.

I seldom think when I take a picture. My eyes and fingers react - click. But first, it's most important to decide on the angle at which your photograph is to be taken.

Several people feel I have photographed God. May be.

The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective. What I mean by objectivity is not the objectivity of a machine, but of a sensible human being with the mystery of personal selection at the heart of it. The second challenge has been to impose order onto the things seen and to supply the visual context and the intellectual framework - that to me is the art of photography.

The art is the challenge which you must meet every day: the technique you should learn to control with time. The science and the art of photography are really one, and not opposed to each other.

It always amazes me that just when I think there's nothing left to do in photography and that all permutations and possibilities have been exhausted, someone comes along and puts the medium to new use, and makes it his or her own, yanks it out of this kind of amateur status, and makes it as profound and as moving and as formally interesting as any other medium.

From childhood my mother had me examining Robert Mapplethorpe's style and Egon Schiele's framing - that's what modelling is about.