Inspirational Quotes for Photographers

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.

• “There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.” — Ansel Adams
• “If you see something that moves you, and then snap it, you keep a moment.” — Linda McCartney
• “The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.” — Andy Warhol
• “You don’t take a photograph. You ask quietly to borrow it.” — Unknown“In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.” — Alfred Stieglitz
• “I don’t trust words. I trust pictures.” — Gilles Peress
• “The picture that you took with your camera is the imagination you want to create with reality.” — Scott Lorenzo
• “Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.” — Marc Riboud
• “We are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us.” — Ralph Hattersley
• “A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.” — Edward Steichen
• “Photography is the story I fail to put into words.” — Destin Sparks
• “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
• “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.” — Ansel Adams
• “Taking an image, freezing a moment, reveals how rich reality truly is.” — Anonymous
• “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 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
• “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
• “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 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
• “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” — Dorothea Lange
• “Once you learn to care, you can record images with your mind or on film. There is no difference between the two.” — Anonymous
• “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” — Diane Arbus
• “What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.”
• — Karl Lagerfeld
• “I wish that all of nature’s magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed.” — Annie Leibovitz
• “I think good dreaming is what leads to good photographs.” — Wayne Miller
• “Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” — Susan Sontag
• “If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff.” — Jim Richardson
• “My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.” — Steve McCurry
• “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
• “Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.” — Yousuf Karsh
• “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
• “Life is like a camera. Just focus on what’s important and capture the good times, develop from the negatives and if things don’t work out, just take another shot.” — Unknown
• “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