Top 290 Photograph Quotes

We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium.

I like to be fascinated by the people I photograph. Sometimes I don’t admire them but I’m interested in them.

A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

For me, nothing brings out my ‘born yesterday’ idiotic qualities quite like having my photograph taken.

It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.

I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.

Even today I work with Niall O’Brien, who is far more technically astute than I am, but I still have the clearest idea of every detail I want in my photograph.

If you think you’re going to create an unposed photograph, think again. There is no such thing.

Carloads of tourists would photograph the family mailbox, and there was weird mail, death threats.

If you recognize a photograph by me, I’m a failure.

I have never seen a picture of my mother. My mother’s family never owned a photograph of her, which tells you everything you need to know about where I’m from and what the world was like for the people who gave me life.

I don’t like my work. I didn’t like my work in ‘Dangal,’ and then in ‘Photograph,’ I was cribbing.

When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has been almost the embodiment of a prayer.

For me, every photograph is a portrait; the clothes are just a vehicle for what I want to say. You’re photographing a relationship with the person you’re shooting; there’s an exchange, and that’s what that picture is.

I’m interested in the person I photograph. The world is so beautiful as it is; there’s so much going on, which is sort of interesting. It’s just so crazy, so why do I have to put some retouching on it? It’s just pointless to me.

A photograph is usually looked at – seldom looked into.

I have no problem with someone wanting to take a photograph with me. It is a no for selfies with touching of bodies.

After Hiroshima was bombed, I saw a photograph of the side of a house with the shadows of the people who had lived there burned into the wall from the intensity of the bomb. The people were gone, but their shadows remained.

A theory is no more like a fact than a photograph is like a person.

I hate getting my photograph taken; just because I’m a musician doesn’t mean I should have to sell my soul and have pictures of myself on stage with a red face and sweaty armpits plastered over ‘Heat!’ every week. I’m not a model.

If you see a gaggle of teenagers walking towards you, you tend not to make eye contact, because you know they’re going to recognise you. You learn to adapt: 99.999 per cent of people aren’t looking to be harmful or unpleasant; they just want something, a photograph or an autograph.

There are cultures that believe having your photograph taken steals your soul. I don’t think there is a stolen soul in a picture, but still – why is it so hard to throw them away?

Actors are hard to photograph because they never want to reveal who they are. You don’t know if you’re getting a character from a Chekhov play or a Polanski film. It depends what mood they’re in.

The way you present a stunt is tied in to the way you photograph it, so you’re hanging out with the cinematographer.

I’m a huge, huge fan of photography. I have a small photography collection. As soon as I started to make some money, I bought my very first photograph: an Henri Cartier-Bresson. Then I bought a Robert Frank.

When you photograph someone, you have to make them feel good, and you know that they want to look good. It’s the same relationship that you have when you apply makeup on somebody. We’re almost like shrinks.

My family were symphonic musicians and in the opera. Also, it was my era, the love of radio. We used to listen to the radio at night, close our eyes and see movies far more beautiful than you can photograph.

We can’t just pay attention to women who look fantastic in a photograph, because there are a lot of people that have fantastic things to say that don’t look like 25-year-old white models.

No one will understand a Japanese garden until you’ve walked through one, and you hear the crunch underfoot, and you smell it, and you experience it over time. Now there’s no photograph or any movie that can give you that experience.

War is the easiest photography in the business. Just get close, be lucky, know how your camera works. There are subjects everywhere. Everyplace you go, there is something to photograph in a war, like being in the middle of a hurricane or a train crash or an earthquake. You can’t miss it.

What difference does it make whether you’re looking at a photograph or looking at a still life in front of you? You still have to look.

I have all my contact sheets filed, from the first photograph I took to the present day.

I’ve spent most of my life embracing violence in wars and revolutions. Even a famine is a form of violence. Because I photograph people in peril, people in pain, people being executed in front of me, I find it very difficult to get my head around the art narrative of photography.

I know the families that I photograph extremely well, and I’ve known them for a very long time.

Whether it’s a photograph or a piece of clothing, a leather bag or a film, I tend to gravitate towards simple, beautifully made, quietly lovely things. They make me happy.

If it was up to me, I would just wear jeans and t-shirts, even to red carpets, but then no one would photograph me, so that would make me very sad. So you know, I’ve gotta keep up with the rest of the female population and sometimes try a little harder.

Everywhere in New York is cool to see and cool to photograph.

I’m not really a guy who looks back or has regrets. In my house there’s only one photograph of me from my playing days.

I know, for myself, I have a very distinct style, and I know what I like, and I know what I don’t like. But it has been a process of learning how to cater to the different events that happen with Hollywood and how you might want to dress for red carpet and what things photograph well.

I was drawn to street photography because there are pictures everywhere there: a woman holding a dog, a baby screaming to be put in a pram, kids playing punch ball, stores with huge barrels of kosher pickles outside. I wanted to photograph life, and here it was.

I’m lucky enough and wealthy enough to be able to buy photographs and buy art that inspires me from day to day. I don’t want a Picasso on my wall; it’s great art, but it’s dead art to me. I’d rather have a photograph by someone I’ve never heard of that really inspires me.

Now in the 1980s, I happened to notice that if you look at an aerial photograph of an African village, you see fractals. And I thought, ‘This is fabulous! I wonder why?’ And of course I had to go to Africa and ask folks why.

Consulting the rules of composition before taking a photograph, is like consulting the laws of gravity before going for a walk.

I don’t like to photograph children as children. I like to see them as adults, as who they really are. I’m always looking for the side of who they might become.

The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader’s mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph.

I photograph artists, and some of them are very well known, but if you ask the average man on the street, ‘Do you like Anselm Kiefer?’ He would stare at you with a blank stare, because these are not celebrities. They are celebrated in a specific circle.

As much as I’m not a journalist, I use journalism. And when you photograph a relationship, it’s quite wonderful to let something unfold in front of you.

I didn’t take that many pictures of The Beatles, but I did photograph them before anybody else knew about them, and that makes me proud. I saw something in them.

The worst thing is when people try and take pictures surreptitiously. I always say, ‘Look, you can ask me for a photograph. You will get a much better one than just the side of my face.’ Sometimes they just run off. They can’t cope.

I think of something quite different from a snapshot. I know of a lot of poems, some very fine ones, that are like snapshots, but I’m more interested in poetry that is like an endless film, long stories, things that weave together many different strands, like a big piece of cloth, not like a photograph.

I’m computer illiterate. I believe the Internet has got every photograph and every detail of my life. But no blogging for me, thank you.