I never question what to do, it tells me what to do. The photographs make themselves with my help. – Ruth Bernhard
Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man. – Edward Steichen
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
Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. – Henri Cartier-Bresson
Everyone has a photographic memory, but not everyone has film. – Author Unknown
Photographs that transcend but do not deny their literal situation appeal to me. – Sam Abbel
A picture is worth a thousand words; a slide show is both. – Author Unknown
Photography is a tough life: you can be taken, framed, exposed, shot, captured, and hung all in the same day. – Author Unknown
One photo out of focus is a mistake, ten photo out of focus are an experimentation, one hundred photo out of focus are a style. – Author Unknown
Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be. – Duane Michals
What the human eye observes causally and incuriously, the eye of the camera notes with relentless fidelity. – Berenice Abbott
Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past. – Berenice Abbott
Photography helps people to see. – Berenice Abbott
I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else. Excitement about the subject is the voltage which pushes me over the mountain of drudgery necessary to produce the final photograph. – Berenice Abbott
In my minds eye, I visualize how a particular . . . sight and feeling will appear on a print. If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice. – Ansel Adams
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know. – Diane Arbus
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
The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking – and looking. – Brooks Atkinson
The photographic image… is a message without a code. – Roland Barthes
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses. – Walter Benjamin
