Anonymous

Every time someone tells me how sharp my photos are, I assume that it isn't a very interesting photograph. If it were, they would have more to say.

I always thought good photos were like good jokes. If you have to explain it, it just isn't that good.

Alex Webb

I mean its an obsession, you follow the obsession but at the same time you have so many doubts, you know. Why am I wasting so much money going back to this place, taking more pictures? What's the point of it? No one cares about it. I think I care about it but maybe I am deceiving myself.

Luck or perhaps serendipity plays a big role. But you never know what is going to happen. And what is most exciting is when the utterly unexpected happens, and you manage to be there at the right place at the right time and push the shutter at the right moment. Most of the time it doesn't work out that way. This kind of photography is 99.9% about failure.

Robert Doisneau

I don't usually give out advice or recipes, but you must let the person looking at the photograph go some of the way to finishing it. You should offer them a seed that will grow and open up their minds.

If I knew how to take a good photograph, I'd do it every time.

If you take photographs, don't speak, don't write, don't analyse yourself, and don't answer any questions.

The marvels of daily life are so exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.

The photographer must be absorbent-like a blotter, allow himself to be permeated by the poetic moment... His technique should be like an animal function... he should act automatically.

Bruce Gilden

I'm known for taking pictures very close, and the older I get, the closer I get.

If you can smell the street by looking at the photo, it's a street photograph.

Ansel Adams

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.

There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.

There is nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept.

You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of Photography all the pictures you've seen, the books you've read, the music you've heard, the people you've loved.

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

Elliott Erwitt

Nothing happens when you sit at home. I always make it a point to carry a camera with me at all times.. I just shoot at what interests me at that moment.

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.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Actually, I'm not all that interested in the subject of photography. Once the picture is in the box, I'm not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren't cooks.

In photography, creation is a quick business - an instant, a gush, a response - putting the camera up to the eye's line of fire, snatching with that economical little box whatever it was that surprised you, catching it in midair, without tricks, without letting it get away. You make a painting at the same time that you take a photo.

The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.

The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

In photography, the smallest thing can become a big subject, an insignificant human detail can become a leitmotiv. We see and we make seen as a witness to the world around us; the event, in its natural activity, generates an organic rhythm of forms.

Pictures, regardless of how they are created and recreated, are intended to be looked at. This brings to the forefront not the technology of imaging, which of course is important, but rather what we might call the eyenology (seeing).

Thinking should be done before and after, not during photographing. Success depends on the extent of one's general culture. one's set of values, one?s clarity of mind one's vivacity. The thing to be feared most is the artificially contrived, the contrary to life.

Martin Parr

I go straight in very close to people and I do that because it's the only way you can get the picture. You go right up to them. Even now, I don?t find it easy. I don?t announce it. I pretend to be focusing elsewhere. If you take someone's photograph it is very difficult not to look at them just after. But it?s the one thing that gives the game away. I don't try and hide what I'm doing - that would be folly.

I looked around at what my colleagues were doing, and asked myself, 'What relationship has it with what's going on?' I found there was a great distortion of contemporary life. Photographers were interested only in certain things. A visually interesting place, people who were either very rich or very poor, and nostalgia.

Steve McCurry

What I learnt from perhaps my most well-known photo 'Afghan girl' is that people are increasingly interested in the context of images, of the life behind the face as it were. I went in search of Sharbat Gula again because so many people asked me who she was, what she did and whether she survived. After seeing the work from the 'Bibin' project in Afghanistan I realised the images and writing from PhotoVoice projects intrinsically provide this intimacy and understanding. Through PhotoVoice projects people like Sharbat Gula are given the vital opportunity to tell their stories for themselves.

What is important to my work is the individual picture. I photograph stories on assignment, and of course they have to be put together coherently. But what matters most is that each picture stands on its own, with its own place and feeling.

Sarah Moon

Very often I say to myself: I would like to make a photo where nothing happens. But in order to eliminate, there has to be something to begin with. For nothing to happen, something has to happen first.

Timothy Allen

It can be a trap of the photographer to think that his or her best pictures were the ones that were hardest to get.

Helmut Newton

Look, I'm not an intellectual - I just take pictures.

Some people's photography is an art. Not mine. Art is a dirty word in photography. All this fine art crap is killing it already.

What I find interesting is working in a society with certain taboos - and fashion photography is about that kind of society. To have taboos, then to get around them - that is interesting.

Roland Barthes

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

The realists do not take the photograph for a "copy" of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.

What the photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.

Edward Weston

I start with no preconceived idea - discovery excites me to focus - then rediscovery through the lens - final form of presentation seen on ground glass, the finished print previsioned completely in every detail of texture, movement, proportion, before exposure - the shutter's release automatically and finally fixes my conception, allowing no after manipulation - the ultimate end, the print, is but a duplication of all that I saw and felt through my camera.

The photograph isolates and perpetuates a moment of time: an important and revealing moment, or an unimportant and meaningless one, depending upon the photographer's understanding of his subject and mastery of his process.

David Bailey

Everyone will take one great picture, I've done better because I've taken two.

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.

Aaron Siskind

To me documentary photography means making a picture so that the viewer doesn't think about the man who made the picture. At its esthetic core is very old tradition in art: naturalism. And its purpose is to document all facets of social relationships.

We look at the world and see what we have learned to believe is there. We have been conditioned to expect... but, as photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs.

Ken Rockwell

Maybe because it's entirely an artist's eye, patience and skill that makes an image and not his tools.

The camera's only job is to get out of the way of making photographs.

You need to learn to see and compose. The more time you waste worrying about your equipment the less time you?ll have to put into creating great images. Worry about your images, not your equipment.

Eric Kim

Honestly the more you shoot, the less awkward it is going to be for you to shoot in public-especially of strangers. Have the mindset that you are not out there to be a creep, but that you are out there capturing the beauty of everyday life.

I'm sure if I always shot in manual mode, I would have lost so many photo opportunities due to the fact that I might have not had the right settings at an unexpected time.

Vernon Trent

Amateurs worry about equipment, professionals worry about money, masters worry about light, I just make pictures...

Craig Coverdale

Remember, not everything is a picture. A good eye can edit before the shutter opens.

Street photography is a renewable resource. If you dont like what you see wait 5 minutes or walk a hundred feet.

Garry Winogrand

If I saw something in my viewfinder that looked familiar to me, I would do something to shake it up.

No one moment is most important. Any moment can be something.

Photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the picture as judgment that the photograph is good.

Matt Stuart

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.

Invisibility would be my superpower if I could choose one... Every now and then when you are doing street photography, you can come into something, you come out... and they didn't realise you were there... it feels like a very meditative sense of being.

The lovely thing about street photography is the best of absolutely no way you can stage or even think of - it's just like - it happened and isn't it weird and it is gone.. I think the craziest stuff is the stuff that is generally real and the stuff you can make up is less impressive.

Wynn Bullock

The urge to create, the urge to photograph, comes in part from the deep desire to live with more integrity, to live more in peace with the world, and possibly to help others to do the same.

Don McCullin

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.

Dorthea Lange

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

Robert Heinecken (1931-2006)

The photograph... is not a picture of something, but is an object about something.

There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph.