Take out your camera and get ready to shoot. These photography quotes will teach you to appreciate photographs as you’ve never seen them before.
While pictures were formerly just used to capture portraits or landscapes, they are now capable of capturing anything you wish to remember.
Photography is an engaging art form with something for everyone to enjoy and appreciate, from casual snapshots for family albums or social media to serious art displays.
Photographs serve as powerful mementos of important occasions or days, transporting us back to the emotions and sounds of the times they capture.
So, if you enjoy being artistic, here are some classic photography quotes.
110+ Top Photography Quotes to Appreciate Photographs
Essentially what photography is life lit up.___Sam Abell
When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.― Ansel Adams
A good photographer records; a great photographer reveals.___David Glen Larson
Photography is truth.__Jean-Luc Godard
Photography is a love affair with life. – Burk Uzzle
The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.__Steven Pinker
What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.― Karl Lagerfeld
To me, photography must suggest, not insist or explain.__Brassai
Photography is the story I fail to put into words.___Destin Sparks
You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.― Ansel Adams
You don’t take a photograph, you make it.__Ansel Adams
Photography is the beauty of life captured. – Tara Chisolm
Photography is the art of making memories tangible.__Destin Sparks
A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.― Diane Arbus
Quotes about Photography
Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work.__Martin Parr
We are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us.___Ralph Hattersley
When I photograph, what I’m really doing is seeking answers to things.___Wynn Bullock
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
Only photograph what you love. – Tim Walker
Seeing is not enough; you have to feel what you photograph.___Andre Kertesz
If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff.__Jim Richardson
What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.__John Berger
Photography is my passion, the search for truth, my obsession.___Alfred Stieglitz
Photography is the recording of strangeness and beauty with beguiling precision.___Sebastian Smee
The earth is art, the photographer is only a witness.__Yann Arthus-Bertrand
Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.― Marc Riboud
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
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.__Susan Sontag
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.___Kate Morton
Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.― Henri Cartier-Bresson
In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.___Alfred Stieglitz
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
A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.― E. Welty
Today everything exists to end in a photograph.― Susan Sontag
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
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
Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.__Steven Pinker
You photograph with all your ideology. – Sebastião Salgado
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 really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.__Diane Arbus
Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.__Dorothea Lange
One advantage of photography is that it’s visual and can transcend language.___Lisa Kristine
The Earth is Art, The Photographer is only a Witness .― Yann Arthus-Bertrand
I didn’t choose photography, photography chose me. – Gerardo Sutter
Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.___Henri Cartier-Bresson
A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.― George Bernard Shaw
Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell.― Kim Edwards
Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.― Ansel Adams
Photography is an itch that won’t go away. No matter how much you scratch it.__Dara McGrath
Part of the role of photography is to exaggerate, and that is an aspect that I have to puncture. I do that by showing the world as I really find it.__Martin Parr
To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk.― Edward Weston
Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.___Garry Winogrand
Women that can work a camera with ease often work men just as effortlessly for both require the same commitment to vanity and manipulation.― Tiffany Madison
My interest in photography is not to capture an image I see or even have in my mind, but to explore the potential of moments I can only begin to imagine.___Lois Greenfield
Photography is a means by which we learn to see the ordinary.___David Bailey
The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet.___Imogen Cunningham
Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real.___Ansel Adams
Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.___Duane Michals
Photography is a medium in which if you don’t do it then, very often you don’t do it at all, because it doesn’t happen twice.___Paul Strand
In the world of photography, you get to share a captured moment with other people.___James Wilson
Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.__Paul Strand
In photography, there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.__August Sander
Photography Quotes on Contrast
Black and white are the colors of photography. To me they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected.___Robert Frank
There’s something strange and powerful about black-and-white imagery.__Stefan Kanfer
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
Contrast is what makes photography interesting. – Conrad Hall
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
Quit trying to find beautiful objects to photograph. Find the ordinary objects so you can transform it by photographing it.___Morley Baer
With photography, a new language has been created. Now, for the first time, it is possible to express reality by reality. We can look at an impression as long as we wish, we can delve into it and, so to speak, renew past experiences at will.___Ernst Haas
Quotes about Photos
A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.___Ansel Adams
There is one thing the photo must contain – the humanity of the moment.___Robert Frank
Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down.___Kate Morton
Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst. – Henri Cartier-Bresson
What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.__Karl Lagerfeld
There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.___Robert Frank
Photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future.___Sally Mann
When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.___Ansel Adams
A photograph shouldn’t be just a picture, it should be a philosophy.___Amit Kalantri
Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.___Matt Hardy
Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.___Ambrose Pierce
All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.__Richard Avedon
I think good dreaming is what leads to good photographs.__Wayne Miller
Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.___Imogen Cunningham
Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like. – David Alan Harvey
We are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us.___Ralph Hattersley
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
Twelve significant photographs in one year is a good crop.___Ansel Adams
Picture Quotes
A picture is a poem without words. – Horace
The picture that you took with your camera is the imagination you want to create with reality.___Scott Lorenzo
A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.___Diane Arbus
Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.___Marc Riboud
There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.___Ansel Adams
A good snapshot keeps a moment that s gone from running away.___Eudora Welty
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
There are no bad pictures; that’s just how your face looks sometimes.___Abraham Lincoln
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
A very subtle difference can make the picture or not.___Annie Leibowitz
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
The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.___Andy Warhol
The more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.___Robert Mapplethorpe
I don’t trust words. I trust pictures. – Gilles Peress
I never have taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse.___Diane Arbus
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
Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.___Diane Arbus
Camera Quotes
A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.__Edward Steichen
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.__Dorothea Lange
A camera alone does not make a picture. To make a picture you need a camera, a photographer and above all a subject. It is the subject that determines the interest of the photograph.___Man Ray
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 Leibowitz
It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera… they are made with the eye, heart, and head.___Henri Cartier-Bresson
The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.___Orson Welles
When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear. –Alfred Eisenstaedt
There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.___Ernst Haas
There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph.___Robert Heinecken
Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.___Yousuf Karsh
My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.___Steve McCurry
A camera is a SAVE button for the mind’s eye. – Roger Kingston
It’s not enough to just own a camera. Everyone owns a camera. To be a photographer, you must understand, appreciate, and harness the power you hold!___Mark Denman
You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.___Ansel Adams
A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they’ll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won’t do a thing for you if you don’t have anything in your head or in your heart.___Arnold Newman
The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?___Edward Weston
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
It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.___Alfred Eisenstaedt
Kodak sells film, but they don’t advertise film; they advertise memories.___Theodore Levitt
Photography is not about cameras, gadgets and gizmos. Photography is about photographers. A camera didn’t make a great picture any more than a typewriter wrote a great novel.___Peter Adams