92 Inspirational Street Photography Quotes

2016-07-20

Share on Facebook Share

Share on TwitterTweet

Inspirational Street Photography Quotes

1. “Photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world.” – Bruno Barbey
2. “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough” – Robert Capa
3. “The Pictures are there, and you just take them” – Robert Capa
4. “I never thought I would become a photographer.” – Rene Burri
5. “Still images can be moving and moving images can be still. Chien-Chi Chang
6. “All the technique in the world doesn’t compensate for the inability to notice.” – Elliott Erwitt
7. “I love photographing. It’s that simple.” – Stuart Franklin
8. “I really don’t have any idea about photography, but I take pictures.” – Alex Majoli
9. “My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.” – Steve McCurry
10. The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don’t belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation.” Susan Meiselas
11. “I think good dreaming is what leads to good photographs.” – Wayne Miller
12. “To take pictures had become a necessity and I did not want to forgo it for anything.” – Inge Morath
13. “I am forever chasing light. Light turns the ordinary into the magical.” – Trent Parke
14. . “I don’t care so much anymore about ‘good photography’; I am gathering evidence for history.” – Gilles Peress
15. .”When people ask me what equipment I use – I tell them my eyes.” – Anonymous
16. ”When you photograph people in colour you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in B&W, you photograph their souls!” – Ted Grant
17. ”Which of my photographs is my favourite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.” – Imogen Cunningham
18. ”The only ‘bad light’ is the absence of light altogether.” – Anonymous
19. “I didn’t choose photography. Photography chose me.” Gerardo Suter
20. “Photography, like alcohol, should only be allowed to those who can do without it.” – Walter Sickert
21. “You can give everything to photography but photography will give you only 1 thing – happiness.” – Anonymous
22. “The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible” – Oscar Wilde
23. “My photography is a reflection, which comes to life in action and leads to meditation. Spontaneity – the suspended moment – intervenes during action, in the viewfinder.” – Abbas
24. “Emotion or feeling is really the only thing about pictures I find interesting. Beyond that is is just a trick.” – Christopher Anderson
25. “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.” – Eve Arnold
26. “It’s not how a photographer looks at the world that is important. It;s their intimate relationship with it.” – Antoine D’Agata
27. “The photographer is filled with doubt. Nothing will soothe him.” – Raymond Depardon
28. “The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things in words.” – Elliott Erwitt
29. “Ultimately photography is about who you are. It’s the truth in relation to yourself. And seeking truth becomes a habit.” – Leonard Freed
30. “I want the viewers to be moved into the lives of the people that they are looking at, the visual experience is incredibly emotional.” Paul Fusco
31. “Taking pictures is like fishing or writing. It’s getting out of the unknown that which resists and refuses to come to light” – Jean Gaumy
32. “I love the people I photograph. I mean, they’re my friends. Ive never met most of them or I don’t know them at all, yet through my images I live with them.” – Bruce Gilden
33. “I have the great privilege of being both witness and storyteller. Intimacy, trust and intuition guide my work.” – Jim Goldberg
34. “I’m very open to any visual conceits and any possibilities at my disposal to be better explain to people the ideas I’m exploring.” – Tim Hetherington
35. “I am not an artist. I am an image maker.” – Thomas Hoepker
36. “The photograph is completely abstracted from life, yet it looks like life. That is what has always excited me about photography.” – Richard Kalvar“
37. A photographer is an acrobat treading the high wire of chance, trying to capture shooting stars.” – Guy Le Querrec
38. “Most of my photos are grounded in people, I look for the unguarded moment, the essential soul peeking out, experience etched on a persons face.” Steve McCurry
39. “A photograph has picked up a fact of life, and that fact will live forever.” Raghu Rai
40. “A photograph is not created by a photographer. What they do is just open a little window and capture it. The world then writes itself on the film. The act of the photographer is closer to reading than it is to writing. They are the readers of the world.” – Ferdinando Scianna
41. “A photo is a small voice, at best, but sometimes – just sometimes – one photograph or a group of them can lure our senses into awareness. Much depends upon the viewer; in some, photographs can summon enough emotion to be a catalyst to thought.” – W. Eugene Smith
42. “I fell in love with taking pictures, with wandering around finding things. To me it feels like a kind of performance. The picture is a document of that performance.” Alec Soth
43. “When I photograph, I try to use my instincts as much as possible. It is when pictures are unconsidered and irrational that they come to life; that they evolve from showing to being.”
44. “Everything shifts as you move, and different things come into focus at different points of your life, and you try to articulate that.” Chris Steele – Perkins
45. “For me, photography has become a way of attempting to make sense of the strange world that I see around me. I don’t ever expect to achieve that understanding, but the fact that I am trying comforts me.” – Mikhael Subotzky
46. “Photography cannot do much. It provides some level of information, yet it has no pretensions about changing the world.” John Vink
47. “I only know how to approach a place by walking. For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown, or the secret heat of the known awaits just around the corner.” – Alex Webb
48. “The idea of a photography seemed to come together with the idea that this is how I could be – someone who could have one step in the world while at the same time being one step removed from it.” – Donovan Wylie
49. “Taking an image, freezing a moment, reveals how rich reality truly is.” – Anonymous
50. “When I use the camera, I often feel likeI know part of the people or places I come in contact with.” – Christophe Agou
51. “Looking and seeing are two different things. What matters is the relationship with the subject.” – Christophe Agou
52. ”Buy a good pair of comfortable shoes, have a camera around your neck at all times, keep your elbows in, be patient, optimistic and don’t forget to smile.” – Matt Stuart
53. ”I’m left handed, have a double jointed finger, and almost lost my thumb when I was younger. I resent the fact that cameras are not made for lefties.” – Matt Stuart
54. “Success is what happens when 10,000 hours of preparation meet with one moment of opportunity.” – Anonymous
55. ”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
56. ”Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
57. ”If I saw something in my viewfinder that looked familiar to me, I would do something to shake it up.” – Garry Winogrand
58. ”I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.” – Garry Winogrand
59. ”Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.” – Garry Winogrand
60. ”There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described. I photograph to see what something will look like photographed.” – Garry Winogrand
61. ”Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.” – Ansel Adams
62. ”The marvels of daily life are exciting, no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.” – Robert Doisneau
63. “Don’t check.” – Lord Ripon
64. ”That right moment.” – Gary Stochl
65. ”With photography, I like to create fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society’s natural prejudice and giving this a twist.” – Martin Parr
66. ”You can’t learn passion, either you’ve got it or you haven’t.” – Martin Parr
67. ”All photography is propaganda.” – Martin Parr
68. ”What I did, anybody can do.” – Weegee
69. ”News photography teaches you to think fast.” – Weegee
70. ”A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.” – Roland Barthes
71. ”What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.” – Rola
72. ”I only use a camera like I use a toothbrush. It does the job.” – Don McCullin
73. ”Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.” – Don McCullin
74. ”I have to shoot three cassettes of film a day, even when not ‘photographing’, in order to keep the eye in practice.” – Josef Koudelka
75. ”I find it particularly exciting when a picture evokes anything near that word, ‘mystery’.” – Jeff Mermelstein
76. ”I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.” – Diane Arbus
77. ”Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.” – Ansel Adams
78. ”You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” – Ansel Adams”
79. ”A good photograph is knowing where to stand.” – Ansel Adams
80. ”The term accessories has come to include a host of photographic gadgets of questionable value.” – Ansel Adams
81. ”Anyone can shoot chaos. But the most perceptive photographers can make compelling pictures out of uninteresting moments.” – Alex Tehrani
82. ”I guess I’ve shot about 40,000 negatives and of these I have about 800 pictures I like.” – Harry Callahan
83. ”Sharpness is a bourgeois concept.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
84. ”I drifted into photography like one drifts into prostitution. First I did it to please myself, then I did it to please my friends, and eventually I did it for the money.” – Philippe Halsman
85. ”I don’t want anyone to appreciate the light or the palette of tones. I want my pictures to inform, to provoke discussion – and to raise money.” – Sebastiao Salgado
86. ”I don’t believe a person has a style. What people have is a way of photographing what is inside them. What is there comes out.” – Sebastiao Salgado
87. ”It’s not the photographer that makes the picture, but the person being photographed.” – Sebastiao Salgado
88. “A photographer strives to be fully aware of every moment, and to be one with all others every moment.” – Anonymous
89. “Once you learn to care, you can record images with your mind or on film. There is no difference between the two.” – Anonymous
90. “Quit trying to find beautiful objects to photograph. Find the ordinary objects so you can transform it by photographing it.” – Morley Baer
91. “Photography is the beauty of life, captured.” – Tara Chisholm
92. “A photograph is the pause button on life.” – Ty Holland