Photography Quotes

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

Photograph, n. A picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. It is a little better than the work of an Apache, but not quite so good as that of a Cheyenne.

Where there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

The camera can photograph thought. It’s better than a paragraph of sweet polemic.

When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I’d like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.

The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy and temperamental; it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.

When Jack London had his portrait made by the noted San Francisco photographer Arnold Genthe, London began the encounter with effusive praise for the photographic art of his friend and fellow Bohemian, Genthe. “You must have a wonderful camera… It must be the best camera in the world… You must show me your camera.” Genthe […]

There are no maps to where no one has gone before.

Calvin: Dad, how come old photographs are always black and white? Didn’t they have color film back then? Dad: Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs are in color. It’s just the world was black and white then. Calvin: Really? Dad: Yep. The world didn’t turn color until sometime in the 1930s, and it […]

A sailor complained to Picasso that his paintings were not realistic, and then took out a tiny snapshot of his child for the painter to see. Picasso squinted seriously at the snapshot and handed it back to the father, merely saying, “Small, isn’t she?”