Here are some photography quotes by some famous and perhaps not so famous photographers.
Notable quotes by some of the world’s best and most famous photographers.
“All photos are accurate. None of them is the truth.” ~ Richard Avedon
“I really do not dislike anything about women. There are some women I do not like but it is like saying: ‘I don’t like all the Chinese because there are a few Chinese I don’t like.’ I adore women and my answer to them is that I wouldn’t have spent all my life photographing women and making them look good if I didn’t like the subject matter” ~ Helmut Newton
“A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.” ~ Annie Leibovitz
“The main thing for me is that I’m happy that I’ve been able to work as a professional photographer. What is at the core of my work is, in essence, a mediation on being a human being.” ~ Eli Reed
“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” ~ Helmut Newton
“All photos are accurate. None of them is the truth.” ~ Richard Avedon
“Best wide-angle lens? Two steps backward. Look for the ‘ah-ha’.” ~ Ernst Haas
“Women especially ask me to take their pictures, because they think I’ll make them beautiful.” ~ Bert Stern
“When I photograph women or fashion, my philosophy is that a woman doesn’t live against a white paper studio background, she has a world of her own that is either in her house, in the street, in a car, by the sea or wherever I fancy to put her. Basically Monte-Carlo and it’s surroundings are my studio.” ~ Helmut Newton
“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” ~ Ansel Adams
“I am not interested in shooting new things – I am interested to see things new.”
~ Ernst Haas
“The camera doesn’t make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But, you have to SEE.” ~ Ernst Haas
“Ultimately success or failure in photographing people depends on the photographer’s ability to understand his fellow man.” ~ Edward Weston
“Any photographer who says he’s not a voyeur is either stupid or a liar.” ~ Helmut Newton
“It’s not the photographer who makes the picture, but the person being photographed.” ~ Sebastiao Salgado
“I’ve worked out of a series of no’s. No to exquisite light, no to apparent compositions, no to the seduction of poses or narrative. And all these no’s force me to the “yes.” I have a white background. I have the person I’m interested in and the thing that happens between us.” ~ Richard Avedon
“If a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it’s as though I’ve neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up.” ~ Richard Avedon
“The photographs don’t arouse me. All I can think about is the hard work it took to make them.” ~ Helmut Newton
“If I have any ‘message’ worth giving to a beginner it is that there are no short cuts in photography.” ~ Edward Weston
“For me a photograph is most successful when it doesn’t answer all the questions and it leaves something to be desired. I like each picture that I take to be a testament to the individual character of my subject.” ~ Greg Gorman
“Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.” ~ Yousuf Karsh
“I don’t want anyone to appreciate the light or the palette of tones. I want my pictures to inform, to provoke discussion – and to raise money.” ~ Sebastiao Salgado,
