Quotes About Photography

You are either born to be a photographer or not. The art of photography is not something you can learn in the classroom or by watching someone do it.

It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.

For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.

Only in black and white can I see the design and textures. I don't consider color photography art. Black and white is an interpretation. Color is a duplication.

The camera can photograph thought. It's better than a paragraph of sweet polemic.

Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.

The invention of photography destroyed the canons of representational, imitative art.

My greatest aim has been to advance the art of photography and to make it what I think I have, a great and truthful medium of history.

I have no doubt about a photographer in particular and a digital artist in general having become contemporary icons.

I say half jokingly that photography is the most difficult of the arts. It does require a certain arrogance to see and to choose. I feel myself walking on a tightrope instead of on the ground.

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

I assumed from the outset that photography was already art, and that I and other people working in photography were artists. I understand now that this was a minority point of view.

Let us... leave art to the artists, and let us try to use the medium of photography to create photographs that can endure because of their photographic qualities.

Find the most puzzling kind of art you can think of, and then go out and try to approximate it with your camera. Take a photograph that corresponds to it. (Assignment to students.)

Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

Those who call themselves art photographers are pompous, arrogant egoists.

I'm not a nice girl; I'm a photographer. (On being told by a Federal Art Project official, after she photographed the Bowery, that a nice girl should not go into such neighborhoods )

For me, pointing and clicking my phone is absolutely fine. People say that isn't the art of photography but I don't agree.

I was always trying to take art photographs, but the most interesting pictures were the snapshots. The artsy pictures were boring, always.

Machines have come, art has fled, and I am far from thinking photography can help us.

Generally, the French highly promote culture and the arts, and photography is in their blood.

To extend the depth of what has been called 'art' into photography requires... making available to the spectator the amazing transformations the subject undergoes to become the photograph.

The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.

In 1967 there was no place for photography in a contemporary art gallery. It was almost impossible to get an art dealer to look at, let alone exhibit, anything photographic.