Photography Quotations

Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.
Ansel Adams

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

Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment.
Ansel Adams



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

I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do - that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.
Diane Arbus

Music is the doorway that has led me to drawing, photography, and writing.
Layne Staley

Photography helps people to see.
Berenice Abbott

Computer photography won't be photography as we know it. I think photography will always be chemical.
Annie Leibovitz

Does not the very word 'creative' mean to build, to initiate, to give out, to act - rather than to be acted upon, to be subjective? Living photography is positive in its approach, it sings a song of life - not death.
Berenice Abbott

Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.
Berenice Abbott

"I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term -- meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching -- there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster." - Ansel Adams

"A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know." - Diane Arbus

"If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life. I mean people are going to say, You're crazy. Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid." - Diane Arbus

"The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking." - Brooks Atkinson

"It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary." - David Bailey

"The photographic image... is a message without a code." - Roland Barthes