I can't touch a camera without expressing myself.
- Andre Kertesz

A photographer's real concern is the act of seeing, with pictures themselves simply the motivation for that act, and its result.
- unknown

Contact sheets should be as private as a toothbrush and guarded as jealously as a mistress.
- Elliot Erwitt

Discovery, which is the heartbeat of good photography, occurs more readily when the photographer relinquishes self-consciousness for a state of humility and childlike wonderment. Then there is a greater freshness and purity in what you capture on film.
- Dennis Stock

The mark of a great poet is the number of pages he does not write.
- Renee Char

As the spirit wanes, the form appears.
- Charles Bukowsky

Surprises of every kind lie in store for the photographer. They open the eyes and quicken the heartbeat of those with a passion for looking.
- Mark Riboud

A photographer is part pickpocket and part tightrope dancer.
- Henri Cartier-Bresson

A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there, even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.
- Robert Doisneau

Photography is interpreting an emotional response to the world into a two-dimensional object.
- Alex Webb

Just the presence of the photographer can influence events. Approach the subject on tiptoe, even if it is a still life. Let your steps be velvet but your eye keen; a good fisherman does not stir up the water before he starts to fish.
- Henri Cartier-Bresson

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining a book is not writing. Researching a book is not writing. Talking to people about what you are doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing. But very few people have the discipline or the dedication, let alone the talent, of Irving or Keroac(or their equals) or Atget, Cartier - Bresson, and Strand for that matter. Most people don't even read Irving or Kerouac (or their equals) or study the work of Atget, Cartier - Bresson and Strand or listen to Mozart and Bach and until they do, their chances of distinguishing between art and trash are limited.
- E.L. Doctorow

An artist does not create what he sees, but what he is.
- Kevin Rossi

Editing is like mining. You go back and see what you hadn't seen before.
- Roy DeCarava

My favorite thing is to go where I've never been.
- Diane Arbus

Learning to print is like learning the musical scales. After you've done it so often, you become the music.
- unknown

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

The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.
- Edward Steichen

I wish more people felt that photography was an adventure the same as life itself and felt that their individual feelings were worth expressing. To me, that makes photography more exciting.
- Harry Callahan

Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communication, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.
- Ansel Adams

For me, the camera is a sketchbook, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. In order to give a meaning to the world, one must feel involved with what one singles out through the viewfinder.

This attitude requires concentration, sensitivity, a discipline of mind and a sense of geometry.

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.

For me photography is to place one's head, heart and eye along the same line of sight. It is a way of life.
- Henri Cartier-Bresson

A print full of tones but empty of emotional content is as dull as a perfectly typed, but meaningless manuscript.
- unknown

Photographic knowledge and skill grow only from failure. Not a few failures, but thousands.
- unknown

In those ordinary surroundings which were my own, I happened to glimpse some fragments of time where the everyday world appeared to be freed of its ugliness. To show such moments could take a whole lifetime. I comfort myself with the thought of all those seeds gleaned by chance from such days, which will perhaps flower in the hearts of new friends.
- Robert Doisneau

Photographs are footprints of our minds, mirrors of our lives, reflections from our hearts, frozen memories we can hold in silent stillness in our hands - forever if we wish. They document not only where we have been but also point the way to where we might perhaps be going, whether we know it yet or not.
- Judy Weiser, Phototherapist

If you sense the potential for a good photograph, you wait, you wait and you wait. Then in a fleeting instant, you grasp it like a predator and relish the moment.
- Marc Ribould

No matter how slow the film, spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer it has chosen.
- Walker Evans

The moment an emotion or fact is turned into a photograph, it is no longer a fact, but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate, none of them are the truth.
- Richard Avedon

All original art is irritating at first before it becomes acceptable to the public.
- Gertrude Stein

A Kertesz photo, whether depicting a city park or a bowl of walnuts, can never be mistaken for the work of another.
- unknown

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.
- George Bernard Shaw

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.
- Twyla Tharp

I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.
- John Steinbeck

For half a century photography has been the "art form" of the untalented. Obviously, some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due? To the designer of the camera? To the finger on the button? To the law of averages?
- Gore Vidal

Passion is in all great searches and is necessary to all creative endeavors.
- W. Eugene Smith

Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man.
- Edward Steichen

The thing that interests me about photography and why it's different from all other media, is that it's the only medium in which there is even the possibility of an accidental masterpiece. You cannot make an accidental masterpiece if you're a painter or a sculptor. It's just not going to happen. Something will be wrong.

This is simultaneously photography's great advantage and its Achilles' heel: it is the easiest medium in which to be competent. Anybody can be a marginally capable photographer, but it takes a lot of work to learn to become even a competent painter. Now, having said that, I think while photography is the easiest medium in which to be competent, it is probably the hardest one in which to develop an idiosyncratic personal vision. It's the hardest medium in which to separate yourself from all those other people who are doing reasonably good stuff and to find a personal voice, your own vision, and to make something that is truly, memorably yours and not someone else's. A recognized signature style of photography is an incredibly difficult thing to achieve.

It always amazes me that just when I think that there's nothing left to do in photography and that all permutations and possibilities have been exhausted, someone comes along and puts the medium to a new use, and makes it his or her own, yanks it out of this kind of amateur status, and makes it as profound and moving and as formally interesting as any other medium. It's like pushing something heavy uphill. Photography's not an easy medium. It is, finally, perhaps the hardest of them all.
- Chuck Close

Let the subject generate its own photograph. Become a camera.
- unknown

Love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art.
- Stanislofsky

My camera is like a skeleton key. It gets me into places I couldn't get into without it.
- Richard Hurst