They say, “Enjoy the moment and put down that camera.” But what if I want to enjoy the moment long after it’s gone? Photography is one way to ensure that the dearest memories and moments last. Figuratively, looking at the photo we took takes us down memory lane to a moment that likely will never happen again. What else, if not images, causes that mind-bending sense of nostalgia? Locations, music, and other things do that too. However, there’s an extraordinary power encapsulated in the now, very often digital, imagery.
The many photography quotes out there indicate the very essence of photography: a picture is a moment frozen in time. A moment that will last a lifetime even when all the things in the photo change. Other than being inspiring, quotes about photography tell the dear reality of why people are obsessed with taking photos. When all is long gone, sometimes pictures are all that we have left. So many inspiring quotes are written about living in the moment and capturing things with your heart, not through a camera lens. And that’s true; we remember certain things so vividly because our emotions were at their peak.
However, our brain doesn’t store all “memory-worthy” moments neatly stacked on a shelf that we can revisit anytime. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. So when we endure another moment that skyrockets our emotions, that memory is quickly replaced by a new one and perhaps won’t be remembered as sharply. It doesn’t necessarily mean that previous memories are less important. However, it does mean that we have lost our emotional attachment to things that happened a while ago.
So next time someone tells you to put down that camera, tell them you will as soon as you’ve taken a picture with it first. Because memories fade, while memories captured in photos last. Below, we’ve gathered an abundance of inspirational quotes and quotes about art, specifically photography. Is there a photography quote or a quote about the art of catching a moment on film that spoke to you? Let us know!
“A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.” — Dorothea Lange
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“I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost.” ― Nan Goldin
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“All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.” — Richard Avedon
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“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.” — Ansel Adams
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“The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.” — Andy Warhol
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“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
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“To me, photography must suggest, not insist or explain.” – Brassai
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“Results are uncertain even among the more experienced photographers.” – Matthew Brady
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“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
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“Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.” — Diane Arbus
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“No place is boring, if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.” — Robert Adams
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“The earth is art, the photographer is only a witness.” – Yann Arthus-Bertrand
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“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
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“If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph.” — Ansel Adams
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“Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.” — Berenice Abbott
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“What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.” — Karl Lagerfeld
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“Wherever there is light, one can photograph.” — Alfred Stieglitz
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“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
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“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
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“If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff.” — Jim Richardson
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“When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I’d like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.” — Annie Leibovitz
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“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
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“The best camera is the one that’s with you.” — Chase Jarvis
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“Once photography enters your bloodstream, it is like a disease.”
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“Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.” - Henri Cartier-Bresson
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“Kodak sells film, but they don’t advertise film; they advertise memories.” – Theodore Levitt
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“Skill in photography is acquired by practice, and not by purchase.” - Percy W. Harris
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“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” — Dorothea Lange
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“It’s more important for a photographer to have very good shoes, than to have a very good camera.” — Sebastiao Salgado
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“Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.” — Ambrose Bierce
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“Every artist has a central story to tell, and the difficulty, the impossible task, is trying to present that story in pictures.” — Gregory Crewdson
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“A landscape image cuts across all political and national boundaries, it transcends the constraints of language and culture.” — Charlie Waite
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“Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.” — Joe McNally
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“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson
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“I like to photograph anyone before they know what their best angles are.” — Ellen Von Unwerth
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“Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.” — Peter Adams
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“The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.” — Orson Welles
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“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
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“Every viewer is going to get a different thing. That’s the thing about painting, photography, cinema.” - David Lynch
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“In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.” — Alfred Stieglitz
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“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
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“A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.” — Annie Leibovitz
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“I’m not all that interested in the subject of photography. Once the picture is in the box, I’m not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren’t cooks.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson
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“Photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future.” — Sally Mann
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“If you see something that moves you, and then snap it, you keep a moment.” — Linda McCartney
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“A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.” — Eudora Welty
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“Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.” — Dorothea Lange
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“I think good dreaming is what leads to good photographs.” — Wayne Miller
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“Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask ‘how’, while others of a more curious nature will ask ‘why’. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.” — Man Ray
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“It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.” — Alfred Eisenstaedt
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“Seeing is not enough; you have to feel what you photograph.” — Andre Kertesz
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“Only photograph what you love.” — Tim Walker
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“Photography is a love affair with life.” — Burk Uzzle
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“I think that emotional content is an image’s most important element, regardless of the photographic technique. Much of the work I see these days lacks the emotional impact to draw a reaction from viewers, or remain in their hearts.” — Anne Geddes
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“The cliche comes not in what you shoot but in how you shoot it.” - David duChemin
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“Photography is the recording of strangeness and beauty with beguiling precision.” – Sebastian Smee
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“A photograph is like a recipe – the memory is the finished dish.”
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“There’s something strange and powerful about black and white imagery.” – Stefan Kanfer
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“When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear.” — Alfred Eisenstaedt
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“A tear contains an ocean. A photographer is aware of the tiny moments in a persons life that reveal greater truths.”
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“I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.” — Diane Arbus
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“Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.” — Marc Riboud
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“Photography has nothing to do with cameras.” — Lucas Gentry
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“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 Leibovitz
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“There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.” — Ansel Adams
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“The more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.” — Robert Mapplethorpe
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“I am not interested in shooting new things – I am interested to see things new.” — Ernst Haas
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“Photography to me is catching a moment which is passing, and which is true.” — Jacques-Henri Lartigue
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“To know ahead of time what you’re looking for means you’re then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting, and often false.” — Dorothea Lange
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“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
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“It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera… they are made with the eye, heart and head.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson
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“If you are out there shooting, things will happen for you. If you’re not out there, you’ll only hear about it.” — Jay Maisel
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“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
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“Photography is pretty simple stuff. You just react to what you see, and take many, many pictures.” — Elliott Erwitt
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“When people ask me what equipment I use – I tell them my eyes.”
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“I wish that all of nature’s magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed.” — Annie Leibovitz
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“The eye should learn to listen before it looks.” — Robert Frank
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“Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.” — Ansel Adams
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“If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera.” — Lewis Hine
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“To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition in a fraction of a second of the significance of an event.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson
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“Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.” — Imogen Cunningham
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“The biggest cliche in photography is sunrise and sunset.” - Catherine Opie
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“There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” ― Ansel Adams
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“The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.” – Steven Pinker
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“I’ve always believed that photography is a way to shape human perception.” – James Balog
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“If your photos aren’t good enough, then you’re not close enough.” — Robert Capa
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“What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are time and light.” — John Berger
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“I don’t trust words. I trust pictures.” — Gilles Peress
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“Photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the photo as a judgment that the photograph is good.” — Garry Winogrand
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“Photography is the story I fail to put into words.” — Destin Sparks
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“The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.” — Elliott Erwitt
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“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
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“Since I’m inarticulate, I express myself with images.” — Helen Levitt
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“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” — Ansel Adams
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“With photography, I like to create a fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society’s natural prejudice and giving this a twist.” — Martin Parr
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“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
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“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
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“The photograph itself doesn’t interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson
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“To photograph is to hold one’s breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson
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“One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.” — Dorothea Lange
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“Photography helps people to see.” — Berenice Abbott
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“My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.” — Steve McCurry
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“Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.” — Yousuf Karsh
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“The best images are the ones that retain their strength and impact over the years, regardless of the number of times they are viewed.” — Anne Geddes
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“Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real.” — Ansel Adams
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“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
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“Photographers stop photographing subjects too soon before they have exhausted the possibilities.” — Dorothea Lange
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“In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.” — August Sander
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“When I photograph, what I’m really doing is seeking answers to things.” — Wynn Bullock
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“My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.” — Helmut Newton
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“The negative is the equivalent of the composer’s score and the print the performance.” — Ansel Adams
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“There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson
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“No matter how sophisticated the camera, the photographer is still the one that makes it.” - Doug Bartlow
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“If you photograph for a long time, you get to understand such things as body language. I often do not look at people I photograph, especially afterwards. Also when I want a photo, I become somewhat fearless, and this helps a lot. There will always be someone who objects to being photographed, and when this happens you move on.” – Martin Parr
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“In the world of photography, you get to share a captured moment with other people.” – James Wilson
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“Photography has no rules, it is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it is achieved.” – Bill Brandt
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“A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.” — Edward Steichen
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“Essentially what photography is is life lit up.” — Sam Abell
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“…we are there with our cameras to record reality. Once we start modifying that which exists, we are robbing photography of its most valuable attribute.” — Philip Jones Griffiths
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“It is my intention to present – through the medium of photography – intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators.” — Ansel Adams
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“Photography is truth.” — Jean-Luc Godard
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“One doesn’t stop seeing. One doesn’t stop framing. It doesn’t turn off and turn on. It’s on all the time.” — Annie Leibovitz
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“Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn’t look like somebody else’s work.” — William Klein
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“Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.” — Matt Hardy
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“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” — Susan Sontag
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“I suspect it is for one’s self-interest that one looks at one’s surroundings and one’s self. This search is personally born and is indeed my reason and motive for making photographs.” — Lee Friedlander
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“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
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“There’s a time when people say your work is revolutionary, but you have to keep being revolutionary. I can’t keep shooting pop stars all my life. You have to keep changing, keep pushing yourself, looking for the new, the unusual.” — Rankin
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“The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?” — Edward Weston
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“If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.” — Eve Arnold
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“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.”
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“A good photograph is knowing where to stand.” — Ansel Adams
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“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.” — Susan Sontag
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“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
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“We are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us.” — Ralph Hattersley
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“The picture that you took with your camera is the imagination you want to create with reality.” — Scott Lorenzo
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“It’s about reacting to what you see, hopefully without preconception. You can find pictures anywhere. It’s simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what’s around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy.” — Elliott Erwitt
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“Once you learn to care, you can record images with your mind or on film. There is no difference between the two.”
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“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” — Diane Arbus
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“It’s not the photographer who makes the picture, but the person being photographed.” — Sebastiao Salgado
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“Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work.” — Martin Parr
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“If I have any ‘message’ worth giving to a beginner it is that there are no shortcuts in photography.” — Edward Weston
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“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
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“The camera has always been a guide, and it’s allowed me to see things and focus on things that may be an average person wouldn’t even notice.” - Don Chadwick
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