Famous Quotes & Sayings

Margaret Bourke-White

As photographers, we live through things so swiftly. All our experience and training is focused toward snatching off the highlights... That all significant perfect moment, so essential to capture, is often highly perishable. There may be little opportunity to probe deeper.

Margaret Bourke-White

Photography is a very subtle thing. You must let the camera take you by the hand, as it were, and lead you into your subject.

Margaret Bourke-White

"Utter truth is essential, and that is what stirs me when I look through the camera."

Mark Twain

A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.

Paul Gauguin

Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth? - photography, once it begins to reproduce colors, and that won't be long in coming. And yet you want an intelligent man to sweat for months so as to give the illusion he can do something as well as an ingenious little machine can!

Paul Gauguin

Machines have come, art has fled, and I am far from thinking photography can help us.

Paul Gauguin

Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth?

Parker Stevenson

My interest in architecture has always been sculptural. Most of my photography is of architecture

Lillie Langtry

Why in the world would anyone want to photograph an old woman like me?

Pablo Picasso

Photography has arrived at the point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and even from the subject. In any case, a certain aspect of the subject now belongs to the domain of photography. So shouldn't painters profit from their newly acquired liberty, and make use of it to do other things?

Pablo Picasso

There's nothing worse than a brilliant beginning.

Pablo Picasso

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

I have discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn.

Pablo Picasso

When you see what you express through photography, you realize all the things that can no longer be the objectives of painting. Why should an artist persist in treating subjects that can be established so clearly with the lens of a camera?

Pablo Picasso

In every photographer there was a painter, a true artist, awaiting expression.

Pablo Picasso

Photographers, along with dentists, are the two professions never satisfied with what they do. Every dentist would like to be a doctor and inside every photographer is a painter trying to get out.

Pablo Picasso

Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?

Paul Cezanne

For an Impressionist to paint from nature is not to paint the subject, but to realize sensations.

Imogen Cunningham

...There are too many people studying it [photography] now who are never going to make it. You can't give them a formula for making it. You have to have it in you first, you don't learn it. The seeing eye is the important thing.

Imogen Cunningham

I was brought up on art. My father thought I had a great hand at art and sent me to art school. But he did not want me to become a photographer.

Imogen Cunningham

The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet.

Imogen Cunningham

I don't think there's any such thing as teaching people photography, other than influencing them a little. People have to be their own learners. They have to have a certain talent.

Imogen Cunningham

The thing that's fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.

Imogen Cunningham

I wasn't very ambitious. I think that's the solution. I just took things as they came. I wouldn't say I didn't have any problem, but I didn't care. I didn't think I was going to save the world by doing photography as some of these people do. I was just having a good time doing it, and so I still had a good time no matter what I had to photograph.

Ilka Chase

Some objects and events may be photographed, others, if one is to render their true quality, should be painted or set to music, since their essence is more faithfully reproduced through imagination than by the journalistic report.

Ilka Chase

Very few people, thank God, look like the pictures of them which are published in the papers and the weekly magazines ...

Keira Knightley

I think women's bodies are a battleground and photography is partly to blame. Our society is so photographic now, it becomes more difficult to see all of those different varieties of shape.

Keira Knightley

I've had my body manipulated so many different times for so many different reasons, whether it's paparazzi photographers or for film posters. [The topless Interview shoot] was one of the ones where I said: 'OK, I'm fine doing the topless shot so long as you don't make them any bigger or retouch.' Because it does feel important to say it really doesn't matter what shape you are. I think women's bodies are a battleground, and photography is partly to blame. Our society is so photographic now, it becomes more difficult to see all of those different varieties of shape.

Keira Knightley

Beauty is everywhere. And my photography came naturally without any particular inspirations growing up.

Julian Barnes

Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning.

Kim Edwards

Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell.

Ken Burns

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.

Kazimir Malevich

I regard photography and film simply as new technical means which painters must absolutely make use of, just as from time out of mind they have made use of brush, charcoal and color. It is certain, however, that photography and film must become as evocative for the sensibility as pencil, charcoal and brush. (1927)