If photography were difficult in the true sense … 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.
—Ansel Adams (1902–84) American Photographer
Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
—Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American Novelist Essayist
You don’t take a photograph. You ask, quietly, to borrow it.
—Indian Proverb
The photographic image … is a message without a code.
—Roland Barthes (1915–80) French Writer, Critic, Teacher
The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.
—Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French Photographer, Journalist
A picture is worth ten thousand words.
—Chinese Proverb
A photograph is usually looked at—seldom looked into.
—Ansel Adams (1902–84) American Photographer
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
—Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) American Documentary Photographer
I am always surprised when I see several cameras, a gaggle on lenses, filters, meters, et cetera, rattling around in a soft bag with a complement of refuse and dust. Sometimes the professional is the worst offender!
—Ansel Adams (1902–84) American Photographer
Everyone has a photographic memory. Some don’t have film.
—Anonymous
It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph—only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.
—Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American Writer, Philosopher
When I first became interested in photography, I thought it was the whole cheese. My idea was to have it recognized as one of the fine arts. Today I don’t give a hoot in hell about that. The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself
—Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American Writer, Philosopher
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
—Diane Arbus (1923–71) American Photographer
Sometimes I do get to places just when God’s ready to have somebody click the shutter.
—Ansel Adams (1902–84) American Photographer
A good photograph is knowing where to stand
—Ansel Adams (1902–84) American Photographer
Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
—Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American Writer, Philosopher
Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.
—Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American Writer, Philosopher
Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth?
—Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist Painter
The Equipment you’ll leave at home, you’ll need the most. You’re always out of film when you’ll have the best opportunity.
—Unknown
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 (1923–71) American Photographer
It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.
—Vincent van Gogh (1853–90) Dutch Painter
A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense, and is, thereby, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.
—Ansel Adams (1902–84) American Photographer
There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.
—Ansel Adams (1902–84) American Photographer
The most refined skills of color printing, the intricate techniques of wide-angle photography, provide us pictures of trivia bigger and more real than life. We forget that we see trivia and notice only that the reproduction is so good. Man fulfils his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera—and himself.
—Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American Historian, Academic, Attorney, Writer
We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-born British Philosopher
One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.
—Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) American Documentary Photographer
Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1913) American Short-story Writer, Journalist
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
—Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American Writer, Philosopher
The photograph itself doesn’t interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.
—Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French Photographer, Journalist
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American Poet
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