Quotes via A Photo Student

“I don’t care so much anymore about ‘good photography’, I am gathering evidence for history.” – Gilles Peress
“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” – Dorothea Lange
“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place…. I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.” – Elliott Erwitt
“I have never taken a picture for any other reason than that at that moment it made me happy to do so.” – Jacques-Henri Lartigue
“I photograph only something that has to do with me, and I never did anything that I did not want to do. I do not do editorial and I never do advertising. No, my freedom is something I do not give away easily.” – Josef Koudelka
“Finding a photograph is often like picking up a piece from a jigsaw-puzzle box with the cover missing. There’s no sense of the whole. Each image is a mysterious part of something not yet revealed.” – Susan Meiselas
“I’m very much against photographs being framed and treated with reverence and signed and sold as works of art. They aren’t. They should be seen in a magazine or a book and then be used to wrap up the fish and chucked away.” – Lord Snowdon
“Sometimes I have taken photographs and just felt so excited that I could barely hold the camera steady, and the photo was boring.” – Robert Rauschenberg


“To take photographs means to recognize — simultaneously and within a fraction of a second — both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one’s head, one’s eye and one’s heart on the same axis.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“I just think it’s important to be direct and honest with people about why you’re photographing them and what you’re doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul, and I think you have to be clear about that.” – Mary Ellen Mark
“For good work to develop the technology needs to become as stable and functional as a typewriter.” – Alec Soth
“And if you can find out something about the laws of your own growth and vision as well as those of photography you may be able to relate the two, create an object that has a life of its own, which transcends craftsmanship. That is a long road, and because it must be your own road nobody can teach it to you or find it for you. There are no shortcuts, no rules.” – Paul Strand
“There is nothing wrong with photography, if you don’t mind the perspective of a paralysed Cyclops.” – David Hockney
“There is no such a thing as artistic photography. In photography, like in all things, there are people who can see and others who cannot even look.” – Nadar
“You see something happening and you bang away at it. Either you get what you saw or you get something else – and whichever is better you print.” – Garry Winogrand
“I didn’t set out to do something different so much as do something that interested me. I wasn’t trying to be avant-garde – that’s being fashionable. You don’t set out to revolutionize art, you make statements for yourself.” – Arnold Newman
“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s ) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.” – Susan Sontag
“I find it particularly exciting when a picture evokes anything near that word, ‘mystery’.” – Jeff Mermelstein
“When I have sex with someone I forget who I am. For a minute I even forget I’m human. It’s the same thing when I’m behind a camera. I forget I exist.” – Robert Mapplethorpe
“The illiterate of the future will be the person ignorant of the use of the camera as well as the pen.” – Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
“In my view you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it.” – Emile Zola