100 Quotes About Photography

Photography is the art and science of capturing and transferring light onto a photosensitive surface, thereby creating an image. Photography is often considered to be an art form, a hobby, or a profession. It has been described as a creative and subjective experience capable of transforming a mundane scene into a work of art. There are different types of photography such as landscape photography, portrait photography, animal photography, macro photography and much more.

Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a...
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Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second. Marc Riboud
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to...
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The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera. Dorothea Lange
When I look at my old pictures, all I can...
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When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not. Aleksandar Hemon
Sometimes I arrive just when God's ready to have somone...
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Sometimes I arrive just when God's ready to have somone click the shutter. Ansel Adams
A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million...
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A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity. George Bernard Shaw
A photograph shouldn't be just a picture, it should be...
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A photograph shouldn't be just a picture, it should be a philosophy. Amit Kalantri
We are often taught to look for the beauty in...
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We are often taught to look for the beauty in all things, so in finding it, the layman asks the philosopher while the philosopher asks the photographer. Criss Jami
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A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth. Richard Avedon
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Art is risk made visible Arno Rafael Minkkinen
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I drift like a cloud, Across these venerable eastern lands, A journey of unfathomable distances, An endless scroll of experiences... Lady Zhejiang here we must part, For the next province awaits my embrace. Sad wanderer, once you conquer the East, Where do you go? Tom Carter
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.. so this is for us. This is for us who sing, write, dance, act, study, run and loveand this is for doing it even if no one will ever knowbecause the beauty is in the act of doing it. Not what it can lead to. This is for the times I lose myself while writing, singing, playingand no one is around and they will never knowbut I will forever rememberand that shines brighter than any praise or fame or glory I will ever have, and this is for you who write or play or read or singby yourself with the light off and door closedwhen the world is asleep and the stars are alignedand maybe no one will ever hear itor read your wordsor know your thoughtsbut it doesn’t make it less glorious. It makes it ethereal. Mysterious.Infinite.For it belongs to you and whatever God or spirit you believe inand only you can decide how much it meantand meansand will forever meanand other people will experience it toothrough you. Through your spirit. Through the way you talk. Through the way you walk and love and laugh and careand I never meant to write this longbut what I want to say is: Don’t try to present your art by making other people read or hear or see or touch it; make them feel it. Wear your art like your heart on your sleeve and keep it alive by making people feel a little better. Feel a little lighter. Create art in order for yourself to become yourselfand let your very existence be your song, your poem, your story. Let your very identity be your book. Let the way people say your name sound like the sweetest melody. So go create. Take photographs in the wood, run alone in the rain and sing your heart out high up on a mountainwhere no one will ever hearand your very existence will be the most hypnotising scar. Make your life be your artand you will never be forgotten. Charlotte Eriksson
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It's often about the simple things, isn't it? Painting and photography are first about seeing, they say. Writing is about observing. Technique is secondary. Sometimes the simple is the most difficult. Linda Olsson
Its not enough to just own a camera. Everyone owns...
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Its not enough to just own a camera. Everyone owns a camera. To be a photographer you must understand, appreciate and harness the power you hold! Mark Denman
Having a camera is not enough. You must understand, appreciate,...
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Having a camera is not enough. You must understand, appreciate, and harness the power you hold! Mark Denman
When your heart jumps every time your camera locks focus......
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When your heart jumps every time your camera locks focus... You've become a photographer. Mark Denman
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[Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this 'me' which like knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features 'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography. Roland Barthes
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A society where feminine beauty is defined not by the human self on genuine intellectual and sentimental grounds, but by a computer software on the grounds of economic interest, is more dead than alive. It is a society of human bodies, not human beings. Abhijit Naskar
It's like a malicious person lifting a photograph from the...
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It's like a malicious person lifting a photograph from the developing chemicals too early, and then pronouncing the photographer incompetent. John Taylor Gatto
Women that can work a camera with ease often work...
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Women that can work a camera with ease often work men just as effortlessly for both require the same commitment to vanity and manipulation. Tiffany Madison
The best thing about photography: it changes your point of...
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The best thing about photography: it changes your point of view. Nina Hrusa
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For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches – and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood. Roland Barthes
If it can happen in your mind, it can happen...
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If it can happen in your mind, it can happen in your camera Arno Rafael Minkkinen
A professional headshot in front of a bookshelf says you're...
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A professional headshot in front of a bookshelf says you're an intellectual. A professional headshot peeking though a bookshelf says you're probably under a restraining order. Ryan Lilly
I have found my way, step by step, proceeding from...
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I have found my way, step by step, proceeding from touch points that have emerged, some through conscious choice and some through dream state discovery. Leonard Nimoy
Photographers don't take pictures. They create images.
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Photographers don't take pictures. They create images. Mark Denman
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They were all highly respectable in their professions and, together, practically unstoppable. But most importantly, they were on her side. She couldn't feel more blessed..or anxious. She sighed. *in italics* Forgive me, Lord, for being so antsy. For worrying, I know it adds nothing to my life or any help to the situation at hand, but it's my friend's disappearance that we're investigating, and I don't know where to start. I don't want to choose the wrong lead. Please direct our investigation and help me to bring Skylar home. I'm the reason she is the way she is. Please don't let it be too late. *end italics* . Dani Pettrey
When you're taking photographs of people, creating the “perfect scenery”...
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When you're taking photographs of people, creating the “perfect scenery” is always secondary. It's much more important to capture the emotions. Especially when there's true love. Nina Hrusa
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I have always loved being behind the camera. I love how it sets you apart in a crowd, so that you can float at the edges, pausing only occasionally to capture a moment. In its own way it’s easier than writing. As a writer, I have to know people, to talk to them, to barge into silences with a dozen of those little lighthearted quips that lead up to a conversation. And even then, they’re guarded around you. Nobody wants their drunken conversation written down somewhere. Being a photographer is different. People come to you. They smile. They flirt. They make sure you see only their best side. Nobody wants to upset the camera. Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
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In the years that I could not see him, I came to know my father through the medium of photography. My perceptions of him were forged on black-and-white squares that stole an instant out of history and immortalized it between the pages of a family album. When I summoned up the image of the man, it came to me frozen, black-bordered, flat. He stood pale above the creases of his uniform, framed in the foamy wake of some ship, drops of sunlight caught in the buttons on his jacket. He winked at me from the liberty ports of countless exotic places. In an atrocious hand he scrawled stilted, affectionate words to the stranger that bore his name and his features, telling of adventures far away, misbehavings under suns hotter than that which shone over the Greater German Reich. Miles Watson
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When I came home, I was asked to put my pictures in a photo exhibit at the Cinematography College ... my pictures won first prize. I began to ask myself what I was doing, and why. A few months after the exhibit, I dropped out of college, left my wife and began to write this book. Vladislav Tamarov
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My husband and I have always been good at creative visualization. Before we quit drugs and got married he’d place tabs of acid on his eyes to see things that weren't there. I'd lay blank sheets of photographic paper on the cornea of developing solution to conjure images. We'd always coaxed dreams from paper, and believed them. Jalina Mhyana
The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings,...
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The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more. Susan Sontag
Thanks to photography, some memories overstay their welcome.
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Thanks to photography, some memories overstay their welcome. Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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Beautiful women have a following all their own. If that sounds misogynistic, I’m sorry, that’s the way the world works. Homer said the Greeks went to war over a woman. I can’t get a battle, but I can get a few hundred thousand views with the right face in a skirt. Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
Photography saved my life by opening my eyes to the...
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Photography saved my life by opening my eyes to the beauty that surrounds me each and everyday. Life look much richer from behind the lens. Donna Kasubeck
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As a photographer you have a deep love for light, life and yourself. You know that the eyes of love aren’t blind, they are wide open. Only when your eye, heart and soul shine brighter than the sun, you realize how ordinary it is to love the beautiful, and how beautiful it is to love the ordinary. Marius Vieth
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What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce. Karl Lagerfeld
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When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence. Ansel Adams
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You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved. Ansel Adams
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A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know. Diane Arbus
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You don't take a photograph, you make it. Ansel Adams
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It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down.... Kate Morton
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A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed. Ansel Adams
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Your first 10, 000 photographs are your worst. Henri CartierBresson
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The Earth is Art, The Photographer is only a Witness Yann ArthusBertrand
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I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost. Nan Goldin
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Art is what we call...the thing an artist does. It's not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human. Art is not in the ...eye of the beholder. It's in the soul of the artist. Seth Godin
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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
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A photograph is usually looked at- seldom looked into. Ansel Adams
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To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk. Edward Weston
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It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us. Henri CartierBresson
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One thing that struck me early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in. Diane Arbus
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Photography is essentially an act of recognition by street photographers, not an act of invention. Photographers might respond to an old man’s face, or an Arbus freak, or the way light hits a building–and then they move on. Whereas in all the other art forms, take William Blake, everything that came to that paper never existed before. It’s the idea of alchemy, of making something from nothing. . Duane Michals
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But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works that can be called art --it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-- photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac's Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, and Atget's Paris. Photography is not an art like, say, painting and poetry. Although the activities of some photographers conform to the traditional notion of a fine art, the activity of exceptionally talented individuals producing discrete objects that have value in themselves, form the beginning photography has also lent itself to that notion of art which says that art is obsolete. The power of photography --and its centrality in present aesthetic concerns-- is that it confirms both ideas of art. But the way in which photography renders art obsolete is, in the long run, stronger. Susan Sontag
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The task of a philosophy of photography is to reflect upon this possibility of freedom - and thus its significance - in a world dominated by apparatuses; to reflect upon the way in which, despite everything, it is possible for human beings to give significance to their lives in the face of the chance necessity of death. Such a philosophy is necessary because it is the only form of revolution left open to us. Unknown
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Nobody has ever taken a photograph of something they want to forget. We can build a wall of happy Kodak moments around ourselves, a wall of our Christmases, birthdays, baby showers and weddings, but we can never forget that celluloid film is see-through, that behind it, all the misery of real life waits for our wall to collapse someday. Rebecca McNutt
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Both those taking snaps and documentary photographers, however, have not understood 'information.' What they produce are camera memories, not information, and the better they do it, the more they prove the victory of the camera over the human being. Unknown
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For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. Diane Arbus
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What I'm trying to describe is that it's impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else's.... That somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own. Diane Arbus
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The snapshots in CHINA: Portrait of a People are not meant to be works of art. I was too preoccupied with participating, with reveling in the moment, to worry about their perfection. Their purpose, then, is to form a candid portrait of China exactly as China presented itself to me. Tom Carter
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Art is nothing more than creating an emotion in your own form. Shannon L. Alder
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Photography is like stealing. You rob someone of a moment that exposes something essential about their character, their soul if you like.there are people who are very conscious of that, who find that terrifying. The thought that everyone, friend of foe, can get so close to you, look you straight in the eye and judge you without having any control over it or being able to respond. A part of them has become the property of the photographer. . Esther Verhoef
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Don't we all know that art is dangerous. You play it - then you live it. Stefan Balint
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Original art emanates in the mind ... and lessons society's confusion from self indulgence, avarice and greed to trust, hope and love. Louis Faurer
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It's true that a picture is worth a thousand words, but it's also true that a word is worth a thousand pictures. Marty Johncox
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All portraits reveal both the the painter and the person painted. In many ways all paintings are self-portraits. All part of why art informs. Brent M. Jones
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Artist communities love to bullshit each other and glad-hand one another, and there's no room for the crippling honesty of comedy." I'm a painter" -- well.. you don't..probably need to do that.. if you're painting something that doesn't exist, I understand that, I can appreciate- . . but if your pain- 'oh, it's a barnyard scene in autumn'--well then just take a picture of a barn in autumn! It's way better than a painting! - Before Turning the Gun on Himself [2012] . Doug Stanhope
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Photographs do not translate from appearances. They quote from them. John Berger
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I often come across this question. "Which is the best camera in the world?". I would always say, "Well. You already own two of it, since your birth. Kowtham Kumar K
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All my images are self-portraits, even when I'm not in them. Nuno Roque
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Nature is beautiful in all its chaos. However, a nature photograph is beautiful only in the absence of chaos. Unknown
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Writing, photography...art. It's all about what's in focus. Kelly E. Lindner
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Not every artistic person should have to be a photographer, but every photographer should be artistic. Pradeepa Pandiyan
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A photograph is the pause button on life. Various
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Photoghraphic projects can be as short as an afternoon or as long as a lifetime. George Barr
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Trauma and pain are the foundations of art. I believe that. When tragedy strikes, however, a muralist or a watercolorist has the opportunity to be a human being in the moment and an artist afterward. Faced with the death of a loved one, a sculptor or portraitist can first grieve, suffer, and heal--then create. Most artists go through life this way. They can react normally to the trials and tribulations of the human experience. They can pass through the world with compassion and comradeship. They can make their art later. Outside, elsewhere, beyond. But photography is immediate. It does not offer the luxury of time. Faced with blood, death, or transformation, a photographer has no choice but to reach for the camera. An artist first, a human being afterward. Photography is a neutral record of all events, a chronicle of things both sublime and terrible. By necessity, this work is made without emotion, without connection, without love. Abby Geni
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Photography is like exploring a new dimension, only I can go there but I can show you where I've been. Destin Sparks
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Some days you just get lucky… Other days you wait patiently for luck to happen Destin Sparks
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The hardest part is setting the camera on the tripod, or making the decision to bring the camera out of the car, or just raising the camera to your face, believing, by those actions, that whatever you find before you, whatever you find there, is going to be good. Sally Mann
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The camera would miss it all. A magnificent picture is never worth a thousand perfect words. Ansel Adams can be a great artist, but he can never be Shakespeare. His tools are too literal. John Dunning
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A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true. Don DeLillo
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Giving Back reframes portraits of philanthropy. Valaida Fullwood
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To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize. Susan Sontag
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Through photography and image I have been afforded the privilege of sharing the stories and myths of people's lives with others. The process for me became self-revelatory. It was a process of soul-making, something all humans are engaged in, no matter their endeavor. I saw a part of myself in each person I photographed. I came to realize, through the alchemical process of living, that each life is important, no matter how little that life seems to offer. J. Don Cook
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A recurrent question about photography is how much self expression it allows the photographer. There are two standard positions, each corresponding to a different location oh photographic skill. The opposition is neatly summed up in Bioy Casares’s novel The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata (1989). The hero Nicolasito Almanza declares: ‘I am convinced that all of photography depends on the moment we press the release […] I believe that you’re a photographer if you know exactly when to press the release.’ In making this declaration he is responding to the opinion expressed by Mr Gruter, owner of a photographic laboratory: ‘[…] sometimes I wonder if the true work of the photographer doesn’t begin in the dark room, amid the trays and the enlarger. . Clive Scott
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Across the valley, a waterfall stumbles down. In a month or two the really hard rains will come down for eighteen hours a day and that waterfall will once again become tough as a glacier and wash away the road. But now it looks as delicate as the path of a white butterfly in a long-exposed photograph. Michael Ondaatje
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At the top, I put the camera's viewfinder to my eye and slowly turned, the way my grandmother had taught me. From every vantage point something remarkable filled the screen- clusters of wild red columbine, fallen boulders forming geometric designs against the wall, crusty green lichen gnawing on rocks, a Baltimore oriole popping from a thicket of brush, and, at my feet, a grasshopper clinging to a stem of purple aster. I could spend a day here and barely scratch the surface. The sun felt warm on my shoulders as I bent down to capture the blossoms of yellow star grass, the feathery purple petals of spotted knapweed, and the lacy wings of two yellow jackets as they alighted on tiny white blossoms of Labrador tea. By the time I finished taking photos of a monarch butterfly resting on milkweed, I realized an hour had passed. Mary Simses
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When you look at nature, you see a hidden mystery that gives a special flavor to the photograph. Abbas Kiarostami
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We may never know what another person is thinking--never truly get into anyone else's head--but photography brings us as close as anything can. When the members of an audience at an art gallery look at a picture, they can step for a moment inside the mind of the artist. Like telepathy. Like time travel. At some future date, when people gaze at my photographs of the islands, they will see what I saw. They will stand where I stood, on this granite, surrounded by this ocean. Perhaps they will even feel some of the elation I have experienced here. . Abby Geni
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Every traveler should make their own observation. Lailah Gifty Akita
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Capture the moment. It is your only sacred-memory. Lailah Gifty Akita
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If you don’t capture the moments, it will be gone forever. Lailah Gifty Akita
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Photoshop and Lightroom help me transform my photos into what my heart felt, but my camera couldn't quite capture! Marius Vieth
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The less gear you use, the more you grow as a photographer. Although there are fewer options available, you'll find more creative ways to capture what you feel! In a way, all your technical options before turn into creative solutions that improve your photography even more. Marius Vieth
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Mandy was thinking back to when she was five years old, when she, her parents and Jud went outside before Christmas and had a snowball fight with the gray snow of Sydney Mines. “This is a wicked blast, ” Jud would say, and Mandy would snap photos with a 35mm disposable film camera, photos she wished very much she could step into sometimes. Rebecca McNutt
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People say that a time machine can’t be invented, but they’ve already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world’s first time machines. Rebecca McNutt
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When you take a photo, you often take your own reality into your camera - the reality that you shaped in your mind - and not the real reality over there, whatever it is! Mehmet Murat Ildan
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A picture's worth a thousand words. But a single word can make you think of over a thousand pictures in your mind, over a thousand moments, a thousand memories. Rebecca McNutt
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This is almost always the case: A piece of art receives its f(r)ame when found offensive. Criss Jami
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How promising today's generation is. They can whip out their cellular phones like sheep, instantly take a million digital photos of their cat and then just delete them. But I'd like to see these kids try to artfully use a traditional film camera or make a super 8 home movie. Traditional film takes integrity, nostalgia, effort, patience and imagination - things that the 21st century has very little of. Everything these days, even a superior medium like film photography with an extensively vivid history and an iconic meaning, is becoming disposable in this age. Rebecca McNutt