Photography Sayings and Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous old photography quotes, photography sayings, and photography proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources.

Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment - this very moment - to stay. Sam Abell
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
If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough. Robert Capa
What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time. John Berger
The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don't have to explain things with words. Elliott Erwitt
Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past. Burk Uzzle
There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept. Ansel Adams
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. Dorothea Lange
Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world. Arnold Newman
Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work. Martin Parr
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
The camera makes you forget you're there. It's not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much. Ansel Adams
Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art. Susan Sontag
One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent. Teju Cole