Famous Quotes & Sayings

Eve Arnold

The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.

Eve Arnold

If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.

Francis Bacon

I've had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from models... I couldn't attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I didn't know...

Francis Bacon

Jesus would have been one of the best photographers that ever existed. He was always looking at the beauty of people souls. In fact Jesus was constantly making pictures of God in people's life by looking at their souls and exposing them to his light.

Jeff Wall

IT'S a pitfall to have a definition of photography,

George Bernard Shaw

I would exchange every painting of Christ for one snapshot.

George Bernard Shaw

There is a terrible truthfulness about photography that sometimes makes a thing look ridiculous.

George Bernard Shaw

What, or who, led you to take up photography, and about what date ? George Bernard Shaw – I always wanted to draw and paint. I had no literary ambition. I aspired to be a Michelangelo, not a Shakespeare. But I could not draw well enough to satisfy myself; and the instruction I could get was worse than useless. So when dry plates and push buttons came into the market I bought a box camera and began pushing the button. It was in 1898.

George Bernard Shaw

The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off.

Galen Rowell

My first thought is always of light.

Galen Rowell

I think landscape photography in general is somewhat undervalued.

Galen Rowell

My interest in photography did not begin with books or mentors, or with any burning desire to see the world through a camera. It evolved from an intense devotion to mountains and wilderness that eventually shaped all the parts of my life and brought them together.

Galen Rowell

When the light is right and everything is working for me, I feel as tense as when making a difficult maneuver high on a mountain. A minute - and sometimes mere seconds - can make the difference between a superb image and a mundane one.

Galen Rowell

There is no question that photography has played a major role in the environmental movement.

Galen Rowell

Often when I walked alone in the mountains, I tried to make sense out of the two halves of my life. What went on in the city during the week seemed chaotic and unrelated to the events in my mountain world.

Galen Rowell

A lot of people think that when you have grand scenery, such as you have in Yosemite, that photography must be easy.

Galen Rowell

Memory selects single important images, just as the camera does. In that manner both are able to isolate the highest moments of living.

Galen Rowell

Ever since the 1860s when photographers travelled the American West and brought photographs of scenic wonders back to the people on the East Coast of America we have had a North American tradition of landscape photography used for the environment.

Galen Rowell

I almost never set out to photograph a landscape, nor do I think of my camera as a means of recording a mountain or an animal unless I absolutely need a 'record shot'. My first thought is always of light.

Galen Rowell

One of the biggest mistakes a photographer can make is to look at the real world and cling to the vain hope that next time his film will somehow bear a closer resemblance to it...If we limit our vision to the real world, we will forever be fighting on the minus side of things, working only too make our photographs equal to what we see out there, but no better.

Galen Rowell

I find it some of the hardest photography and the most challenging photography I've ever done. It's a real challenge to work with the natural features and the natural light.

Galen Rowell

I began to realize that the camera sees the world differently than the human eye and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed.

Galen Rowell

At the heart of all photography is an urge to express our deepest personal feelings - to reveal our inner, hidden selves, to unlock the artist. Those of us who become photographers are never satisfied with just looking at someone else's expression of something that is dear to us. We must produce our own images, instead of buying postcards and photo books. We seek to make our own statements of individuality.

Franz Kafka

Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens.

Jaron Lanier

Here’s a current example of the challenge we face: At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?

Gus Van Sant

Digital information, for every type of storage, is unfounded. If everything is on a hard drive and the hard drive freezes up, your whole photography collection could just go away. We can still look at printed photographs of our grandparents. We can physically hold them in our hands and look at it.

Graham Nash

I've been a photographer all these years... I haven't been in my own darkroom for 10 years.

Jean Baudrillard

Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images.

Jean Baudrillard

For me, the photography, in its purest form, is a variant of the fable. Another way of saving the appearances - a way of signifying, through this fabulous capture, that this supposed real world is always about to lose its meaning and its reality...

Jean Baudrillard

It is perhaps not a surprise that photography developed as a technological medium in the industrial age, when reality started to disappear. It is even perhaps the disappearance of reality that triggered this technical form. Reality found a way to mutate into an image.

Jean Baudrillard

So-called 'realist' photography does not capture the 'what is.' Instead, it is preoccupied with what should not be, like the reality of suffering for example.

Kirk Douglas

Virtue is not photogenic.

Judith Butler

Photography has a relation to intervention, but photographing is not the same as an intervening.