“In my view, the only way to see a film remains the way the filmmaker intended: inside a large movie theater with great sound and pristine picture.”

~ Ridley Scott

“Life is short.Break the rules. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. Love truly. Laugh uncontrollably and never regret anything that makes you smile.”

~ Robert Doisneau 
(1912-1994)


“Our friendship is lost in the darkness of time .We will no longer have his laugh, full of compassion , nor his hard hitting retorts, so funny and profound.Never told twice, each time a surprise. But his deep kindness, his love for all beings and for a simple life will always exist in his work.”

~ Henri Cartier Bresson on learning of his friend’s passing in 1994

“Snow was falling, 
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness.”

~ Mary Oliver

“When I take a photograph, I feel like a young man again—ageless.
In the sublime moment of making a photograph, there is nothing else to wait for; it is there. Time has melted in an instant. Some have invented eternity; I am simply a modern inventor. I play with the moment. Whoever finds a treasure—a treasure offered to everyone—becomes its inventor, its discoverer, a catcher of light.

‘Come, my love, enter. Take a look. Just for the pleasure.’”

~ Edouard Boubat
(1923-1999)

“I’m going to live til I die.”
~ Frank Sinatra. 1915-1998

“The beauty of a woman is not in the clothes she wears, the figure that she carries or the way she combs her hair. The beauty of a woman is seen in her eyes, because that is the doorway to her heart, the place where love resides.True beauty in a woman is reflected in her soul.It’s the way that she lovingly gives, the passion that she shows and the beauty of a woman only grows with passing years”

~ Audrey Hepburn 
(1929-1993)

“Photographers stay young because until the end they would like to pull off one more good shot.”

~ Gianni Berengo Gardin
(1930-2025)

“I have never sought the unexpected, the novelty, the extraordinary, but rather what is most typical of our daily life. I go out to find people who resemble me and the mirror which these images offer them is the same as that in which I see myself.”

~ Willy Ronis (1910 - 2009)

“My work is an urgent call to live. A primal roar telling me not to waste a second, to be here now.“

~ Cig Harvey

“Dogs are our link to Paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing is not boring -it was Peace”

~ Milan Kundera 


“If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”

~ Harry S Truman

"Good pictures are good pictures and that's never going to change. And bad pictures are bad pictures and that also is never going to change."~ Elliott Erwitt (1928-2023)

“Before a cat will condescend to treat you as a trusted friend, some little token of esteem is needed, like a dish of cream!”

~ T S Eliott

“The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.”

~ Jacques-Yves Cousteau
(1910 - 1997)

“Nothing is ever the same twice because everything is always gone forever and yet each moment has infinite photographic possibilities."

~ Michael Kenna

“Photography is the soul of all moments, the soul of the moment before it nears its end.”

~ Sarah Moon

"I took my chances and reinvented film photography. My objective was to show exceptional moments.”

~ Raymond Cauchetier 
(1920-2021)

“In the late winter the snow silently falls, and the gorgeous beauty of the common is shrouded in a veil of fairest white.”

~ P.H. Emerson (1856-1936)

“My eyes search for people who are grateful for life, people who forgive, whose doubts have been removed, who understand the truth, whose enduring spirit is filled by such piercing light as to provide their present and future with hope.”

~ Louis Faurer

“A picture can express a universal humanism or simply reveal a delicate and poignant truth by exposing a slice of life that might otherwise pass unnoticed.”

~ Steve McCurry

“A portrait is most successful when nothing stands between the sitter and the truth.”~ William Saunders (1832 - 1892)

“Color gives photography the charm of reality.”

~ Louis Lumière (1864 - 1948)

"While 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.” 

- Dorothea Lange

“I retreated to my Somerset home and walking out of my front door in all weather, through fields, between trees and over hills, watching, waiting, being still - that was my therapy. The photographs reflected that.”

~ Don McCullin

I like tranquillity and silence – who would not?
I think I enjoy the life most in remote districts photographing the life and the environment that are vanishing. The transience of life often increases the importance and value of a photo – the world changes but the image remains. 

~ Pentti Sammallahti

“Departures and arrivals are in the very nature of life. As a photographer, I have probably had more of them than most people. Some departures went smoothly, sometimes they hurt. The arrivals were always hopeful. Things change in every life and disappear, but it is the photographs that remain from my life. ”

~ Charles Harbutt (1935 - 2015)

“There had been a raging blizzard during the night. When I awakened in my bed, I looked toward the window to see a magnificent display of frost. Nature's storm had playfully arranged what seemed to be stationary snowflakes on the pane of glass. Looking through the window and its decoration of frosted crystals, I saw a tree trunk with its branches rhythmically and joyfully dancing as if in celebration of the visual magic that was before my eyes. It was now up to me to quickly arise and to gather my equipment and film to etch all this beauty and magic onto film and silver paper.”

~ Paul Caponigro (1932 - 2024)

“I inherited photography as my birthright. But I’m a color photographer. That’s what I do. Whether you like it or not. There is nothing wrong with black or white, but I’m into color and I like it!”

~ Cole Weston

“At the sublime moment of taking a photograph, there is nothing else to wait for: it is there. Time has melted in an instant. Some have invented eternity; I am simply a modern inventor. I play with the moment. Whoever finds a treasure, a treasure offered to everyone, becomes its inventor, its discoverer: a light catcher.”

~ Edouard Boubat 1923-1999

“Everything you’ve read about The West and cowboys is in some strange fashion true. Learned how to load film on horseback, at a trot and in driving snow. I learned how to be ready, to stay out of the way and to always thank the cook.”

~ Kurt Markus
(1947 - 2022)

“Everything is alive: the weather, the rain, everything, and one does not control it. I’m interested in what life offers.”
~ Louis Stettner (1922 - 2016)

“Life was cheap and everyone could have a ball. You could always go out and have some fun.”~ Sanlé Sory

“My 2CV had stopped at a red light alongside the bank of the Rhône where some kids were playing. The composition was good: click. The light turned green and the flow of traffic carried me on to my next shot.” 

~ Willy Ronis
(1910-2009)

“Maybe things will get better when IT fails.” 

~ Jean‑François Fresson

"To collect photographs is to collect the world."

~ Susan Sontag 'On Photography'

"The young photographer in his eager desire to master the technical aspects of the medium very frequently pays no attention to the artistic properties of his pictures…..Such I freely confess, was the case with myself…..so having in some degree mastered the difficulties of manipulation, my ambition spurred me on to attempt to produce pictures which should be as much admired for their artistic qualities, as for their excellence viewed in a purely photographic light."

~ Samuel Bourne Feb. 24,1860

“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity.” 

~ John Muir
(1838 - 1914)

“Form an extended sequence that moves from innocence to decay and return.”

~ Jed Devine (1944-2024)

“When I’m not making work, I’m spending my time reading. I’m reading and thinking about how to present something in a different way visually or through words”

~ Cig Harvey

“Making visible the silence, the simplicity of nature and a sense of passing time. This is my work”~ Byung-Hun Min

“Some of my best pictures were taken when I wasn’t “working”, models getting ready, people in the street, the little moments in between shots. That’s when you can really capture people as they truly are and what’s underneath. It’s those real moments that can’t be faked.”

~ Arthur Elgort

“For me personal experiences are the initial impulses to create. When presenting the work after period of contemplation, I hope these feelings and emotions become more abstract and universal. In the end it is not about meant about us, but a deeper, universal emotion and connection”

~ Paul Cupido

"As a rule I do not like to explain my photographs, I want my pictures to be read and explored. I believe a good picture is open to many individual (subjective) associations. I am usually pleased when a viewer finds interpretations that I myself had not been aware of."

~ John Gutmann
(1905-1998)

“The Cinema is not a craft. It is an art. It does not mean teamwork. One is always alone on the set as before the blank page. And to be alone means to ask questions. And to make films means to answer them.”

~ Jean-Luc Godard
(1930-2022)

"It's hard to beat a person who never gives up." ~ Babe Ruth

“There are no wrong notes: some are just more right than others.” 
~ Thelonious Monk
(1917-1982)

“For me, Jazz has always been a music for freedom.” 
~ Herb Snitzer 
(1932-1922)

“We have to educate our perception; it has to be gathered and shepherded, and it needs something to graze upon.”

~ Frederick Sommer
(1905-1999)

“I read a Sufi poet, a very old man where he speaks of the “language of the birds” which is a very beautiful story. It is very difficult to tell it all but in short all the birds gather together to make a journey
to find God. On that journey they come and they find each other.”

~ Graciela Iturbide

“I still love the darkroom. I print every other day. At least every week I’m in the darkroom, printing. It’s a process and people ask “Why not switch to digital?" It’s not the same: the feel isn’t there. In the darkroom you have complete control: you are the master of what you’re doing and how you develop it and how you bring it up.”

~ Earlie Hudnall Jr

"If I had to pick one album out and say, 'This is going to represent you 50 years from now,' I'd  pick 'Nebraska" 

~Bruce Springsteen

"It isn't what a picture is of, it is what it is about."

~ John Szarkowski 
(1925-2007)

“My images reach dimensions words cannot touch. My quest, through the magic of light and shadow is to isolate, to simplify and to give emphasis to form with the greatest clarity. To indicate ideal proportion, to reveal sculptural mass and the dominating spirit is my goal”

~ Ruth Bernhard
(1905-2006)

"I have always felt that I have been standing in the middle ground between two eras, with one eye on the 19th century and the other on the 21st ... all across America we have left abandoned, like carcasses after the feast, that which only yesterday was state-of-the-art invention.” 

~ David Plowden

“People always ask me “How do you relate to people. How do you get people to open up and relax?" I think it is just a question of experience. I think it’s a question of enjoying being with people.”~ Steve McCurry

"Mysteries lie all around us, even in the most familiar things, waiting only to be perceived."

~ Wynn Bullock
1902-1975

"Photography is so connected to time, its our currency"

~ Cig Harvey

“For me photography is pure fiction - I don’t believe that I am making any defined statement. Instead, I am expressing something, an echo of the world maybe." 

~ Sarah Moon

“Photography teaches us to see, and we can see whatever we wish. When I take a photograph, I make a wish. I was always looking for beauty.” 

~ George Tice
(1938-2025)

“Brassai showed me that it was possible to find something significant in photography subjects in everyday life doing ordinary things by interpreting them in your own way and with your own personal vision”

~ Louis Stettner
(1922-2016)

"Despite the prevailing tastes of the “New Wave” period it is not the traditional film stills -the ones my colleagues and I were paid to produce, that have written the history of cinema, but the “non - film photos”, those that show the methods and characters of the directors and the hidden face of cinema."

~ Raymond Cauchetier
(1920-2021)

"Laura Ashley asked me to photograph some of her summer collection in the studio. I told her they need to be photographed in the countryside because her dresses were considered “romantic”. She said “Why don’t you come and stay at my house in Wales as I’m going on holiday”
So Marianne Lah who was my girlfriend and I drove to Wales. We took no hair, make up or stylist. Just the two of us. The countryside around her house was spectacular. I just had to point the camera”

~ John Swannell

“I don’t like ephemeral things. I just like things that last forever”

~ Laura Ashley

“Everybody can look but they don’t necessarily see”

~ André Kertész
(1894-1985)

“My work is my language and I don’t discuss it very easily. It’s difficult for me to verbalize my feelings or to intellectualize my work.” 

~ Brett Weston
(1911-1993)

"I often try to photograph things about a person that are not visible."

~ Duane Michals

“The ideal picture tells something of the essence of life. It sums up emotion, it holds the feeling of movement, thereby implying the continuity of life. It shows some aspect of humanity, the way that the person who looks at the picture will at once recognize as startlingly true.”

~ Bert Hardy 
(1913-1990)

“Everything is a subject. Every subject has a rhythm to feel it is the “raison d’être”. The photograph is a fixed moment of such a “raison d’etre” which lives on in itself.”

~ André Kertész
(1894-1985)

“I surely am pursuing happiness with my camera. When I take pictures of children, I’m not trying to capture their cuteness or emerging beauty .I seek to capture the essence of childhood. I see the child as a chrysalis of a future adult.”

~ Martin Elkort

"In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality."

~ Alfred Steiglitz 
(1864-1946)

"The techniques of photography are not very hard to master. The difficult thing is to become a sentient, cognitive human being. If anyone is going to be good at this thing, they must push themselves to levels of sensory awareness that are beyond the ken of ordinary mortals.”

~ Jack Welpott

“I take photographs to hold on to the ephemeral, capture chance, to keep an image of something that will disappear, gestures, attitudes, objects that are reminders of our brief lives. The camera picks them up and freezes them at the moment that they disappear.”

~ Sabine Weiss
(1924-2021)

“I found my way through life through the camera’s lens. I used it to record my feelings about the world. Still do."

~ Bruce Davidson

“Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even if it is clumsy, that doesn't look like somebody else's work.”

~ William Klein
(1928-2022)

“A fine image is geometry, modulated by the heart.” 
~ Willy Ronis
(1910-2009)

“My mother told me to be a lady. 
And for her that meant be your own person, be independent.

I do think I was born under a very bright star. Because if you think about my life, I get out of law school. I have top grades. No law firm in the city of New York will hire me. I end up teaching. It gave me time to devote to the movement for balancing out the rights of women and men."

~ Ruth Bader Ginsberg 
(1933-2020)

“In photography, we don’t capture time, we evoke it. It flows like fine sand, endless. We don’t take a photograph, we “see” it, then we share it with others. I practice photography to be on one level with the world and what is happening”

~ Bernard Plossu

“In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a leitmotive.”

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
(1908-2004)

“I give the moment permanence."

~ Manuel Alvarez Bravo
(1902-2002)

“The moment always dictates in my work. Everybody can look, but they don’t necessarily see. I see a situation and I know it’s right.”

~ André Kertész  
(1894-1985)

“Music chose me but photography needed me. The Gods of music on the mountain on the Right were called upon by the mountain of photography as art on the Left.They said “We are so young and know so little can you please give us something from your realm, somebody to come to invest our photography with the power of music?” So I became a photographer. The Gods of music sent me over. In both cases I was chosen by music in order to put it into photography.”

~ Paul Caponigro 
(1932-2024)

“My father was Venetian from St Mark’s Square, my wife is Venetian, my children are Venetian. Although I was not born there, I have always considered myself an adopted Venetian.”

~ Gianni Berengo Gardin
(1930-2025)

“Making people laugh is one of the highest achievements you can have and when you can make someone laugh and cry, alternatively as Charlie Chapin does, now that’s the highest of all possible achievements.”

~ Elliott Erwitt 
(1928-2023)