"Even though fixed in time, a photograph evokes as much feeling as that which comes from music or dance. Whatever the mode, from the snapshot to the decisive moment to multi media montage - the intent and purpose of photography is to render in visual terms feelings and experiences that often elude the ability of words to describe. In any case the eyes have it and the imagination will always soar further than was expected.”
~ 
Ralph Gibson

“I will never say I won’t do a job because I don’t like it. There are somethings I can’t do because I don’t know how to, but otherwise I will do anything and this is a good lesson in humility. Even though I am doing exactly what my client wants, I put my personality into the pictures”

~ Jean-Philippe Charbonnier 
(1921-2004)

“Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there."

~ Miles Davis
(1926-1991)

“The world is filled with incredible things. So I’m happy to just let my eye be caught by something. If something catches my eye that’s enough reason to take the picture.”
~
Henry Wessel
(1942 - 2018)

“The camera is an unsophisticated mechanical instrument which, like a mirror, reflects passively without a conscience. The artist must supply the conscience.” 

~ Ralph Eugene Meatyard 
(1925-1972)

“I look at this image and applaud the artists and artisans who made these standing sculptures and placed them in the stately gardens of Versailles. My mind inevitably wanders to Andre Le Nôtre, (1613-1700), the landscape architect who created many such wonderful perspectives of garden topiary in and around Paris. I then telescope back to take a more distant view of planet earth, a speck in our immense universe, with all the magnificence, beauty and mystery of it all. In 1996, I stopped, looked, saw and appreciated what was in front of me, on one of the many thousands of frosty mornings Versailles has experienced. I clicked the shutter on my camera, (which was made by somebody else, in another country). The image exposed on film, (manufactured thousands of miles away). It was processed in a laboratory, (in another distant city). I made the eventual print, in my own darkroom, and even had the audacity to sign it. But, let’s face it, I was and remain a bit part actor in an enormous cast of giant characters, and I’m absolutely fine with that.”
~
Michael Kenna

"Photography has always been my life. I've always taken photos. I always have my Leica on me and, as soon as I feel an emotion in relation to something I see, I photograph it, no matter where I am."

~ Dolorès Marat

“I devised a little technique to get around the restrictions and successfully take photos in a museum. All you need is a small camera that is inconspicuous and doesn’t make too much noise. When the attendant is not looking, you adjust it to your eye level and cough slightly while pressing the button to disguise the noise of the shutter release. You can also bribe the attendant, a more efficient and direct practice in some countries.”
~
Elliott Erwitt
(1928 - 2023)

“The city was my home. As I look back at the work I did during that period, I realize that I was a witness to a time that no longer exists, a more innocent time. While I know that the city has changed, that the streets are dirtier and meaner, the energy that I love is still there. No matter where I go, I keep coming back to photography New York. Of course the “good old days” were not all sweetness and light. There was poverty, racism, corruption and violence in those days too, but somehow we believed in the possible. We believed in hope.”
~
Arthur Leipzig 
(1918 - 2014)

“Having seen so much it seems that Arthur Leipzig wanted to go on seeing much more land what he has shown us remains hauntingly clear. His images say, look at us and be born again. Taken out of time they refuse to grow faded, and with the clock moving on, Arthur Leipzig’s camera should be moving with it. He should never yield to inactivity. Life as he shows it is what life is all about.” 
~
Gordon Parks 
(1912 - 2006)

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

~ Gianni Berengo Gardin

“My photography is rooted in a curiosity and reverence for the human experience. I’ve always been fascinated by people. ”
~ Ron Cooper

“I love to watch very common species- sparrows, crows, pigeons, ducks, gulls, domestic birds- from home doorsteps to the ends of the earth. They are lovely and easy and sometimes funny to observe.”
~ Pentti Sammallahti

“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”
~ Susan Sontag
(1933 - 2004)

“We don’t take pictures with our cameras. We take them with our hearts and we take them with our minds. The camera is nothing more than a tool.”

~ Arnold Newman
(1918-2006) 

“Photography has given me a life. The very least I could do was to try and articulate these stories with as much compassion and clarity as they deserve, with as loud a voice as I could muster. Anything less would be mercenary.”

~ Don McCullin

“I don’t speak emotionally about my pictures.That’s for other people to do. I will say that I love my photos. That’s what keeps me going. 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)

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

“It was in New York that I honed my skills and began to learn about the world and myself"
~ Arthur Leipzig 
(1918 - 2014)

“It would be difficult to rub out the memory of boys diving into the East River-enough to make one want to be a boy forever”
~ Gordon Parks
(1912 - 2006)

“The photographs that remain strong and alive seem to be when your vision and reality are so inexorably wedded together it is impossible to separate them”~ Louis Stettner (1922 - 2016)

“The world has been always made of many different layers – even before the disaster. And there have been always problems, and beautiful things have always remained beautiful…” 

~ Miho Kajioka

"I am a visual man, I watch, watch, watch. I understand things through my eyes"

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004)

“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”

~ Don McCullin


“Some stories must be told, not because they will delight and instruct, but because they happened ”

~ Michael Herr 
“Dispatches”


“To make you hear, to make you feel, to make you see” 

~ Joseph Conrad

“I have come to believe in the superiority of discovery over invention. What is important is not what I make happen but what happens to me.”

~ Burt Glinn

“I worked 12-15 hours a day. I couldn’t stop myself with the brilliant constant light. When you have a sunset in Europe it is maybe half an hour or an hour. Here we had five or six hours.”

Sebastião Salgado
(1944 - 2025)

" Photography is an art of observation. It has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them”

~ Elliott Erwitt
(1928-2023)

“It’s the subject matter that counts. I’m interested in revealing the subject in a new way to intensify it…… wanting to see more makes you grow as a person and growing makes you want to show more of life around you”~ Harry Callahan (1912-1999)

"When I first saw this copse, the trees were dramatic and dark, set against grey, ominous clouds. I photographed them at dusk, until it started to rain, and then drove off to visit a Buddhist temple many miles away. I was unaware that these trees were imminently at risk to be cut down and replaced with a liquified natural gas industrial development. Fortunately, an environmental movement was set up to fight against the destruction of the trees and it succeeded in preserving them. I was very happy to later learn that my photograph was used as part of their campaign. The LNG plant was eventually built, but it was put underground and the trees survive to this day. I have revisited this location many times since and intend to continue photographing these beautiful trees."~ Michael Kenna

“My children lived in St. Malo for a very long time, my son had a small apartment directly on the beach above a restaurant, obviously I was often at the window to see the sea, when I was there, one day a huge storm arrived, broke all the windows of the restaurant and everything in the dining room flew towards the sea, the restaurant was emptied in a few minutes, fortunately before this storm I took a photo of this lady who looked at the sea. The rest of the restaurant was destroyed a few days later.”

~ Dolores Marat

“We didn’t know where it was all going. We just didn’t know. One day in 1968 I got a phone call which I thought was just a joke. An unfamiliar male voice said he was phoning from Apple and wondered if I would consider spending a day photographing The Beatles for a fee of two hundred pounds. They were a little tired of approaches from photographers and wanted to get a fresh supply of pictures I suppose. Given the year with all its political associations, they thought they could work with somebody who might be politically sympathetic. They didn’t know that I had practically levitated a couple of inches off the ground. I would have given them two hundred pounds”

~ Don McCullin 

“Don’s a very cool guy. He is one of the great British photographers. We thought we’ve got to be the war. We’ll provide the battlefield and it’ll work. He’ll just click into action.That’s exactly what happened.”

~ Paul McCartney

"I remember once I was working in Alaska. I was in The Brooks Range. I had a small plane that drove me to a point and left me there and came back for me one week or ten days later because in Alaska you cannot fly always. It was June. You have the cold air coming from the Arctic and hot air from inside Alaska and they meet over this Brooks Range, over this mountain and it creates a lot of micro climate. In June I had a lot of snow and a lot of rain, hot, cold, everything happened there. The plane was forced to leave me there. I’m sitting there all day long in front of the mountain. You are the planet. You are part of all this together and you see how the wind cuts at this mountain like a knife and it creates sand that will create soil and you see all the vegetation. The small vegetation fights to survive. It’s amazing."Sebastião Salgado(1944 - 2025)

“Photography is a medium, a language, through which I might come to experience directly, live more closely with, the interaction between myself and nature.” 

– Paul Caponigro

"Mexico is a land pervaded by myths and legends, a land plunged into a voluptuous and sensual nature, kissed by the sun and by of those exotic and ancestral places"

~ Flor Garduño

"Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you and you must know with intuition when to click the camera"

~ Henri Cartier Bresson 
(1908 - 2004)

“If there’s not love present, it’s much harder to function. When there’s love present, it’s easier to deal with life”

~ Brian Wilson “I may not always love you
But long as there are stars above you
You never need to doubt it
I’ll make you so sure about it 
God only knows what I’d be without you”

~ Brian Wilson

“For a split second I see a sparkle of beauty passing by. That instance of grace that I nearly missed and that will never happen again”

~ Sarah Moon

“I said to her, "Do something with the spirit of the studio corner" and she started to move on the sofa. She just made a movement. I took only two photographs. No need to shoot a hundred rolls like people do today. People in motion are wonderful to photograph. It means catching the right moment - the moment when something when something changes into something else”

~ Andre Kertesz 

‘“Whatever we have done, Kertesz did first. We all owe something to Kertesz”

~ Henri Cartier Bresson

“The whole point of taking pictures is that you don’t have to explain things with words”

~ Elliott Erwitt 
(1928-2023)

“In the grand tradition of twentieth century photography there are many great image makers. But few were so skilled as Elliott Erwitt when it came to gently capturing the poignant absurdities and paradoxes of the human condition”

~ Graydon Carter and Nathan King
Foreword to the new book “Elliott Erwitt : Last Laughs”

“The joy of geometry ! When you realize everything is right"

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

”The camera is a remarkable instrument. Saturate yourself with your subject and the camera will but take you by the hand and point the way”

~ Margaret Bourke-White
(1904-1971)

“Travel has to be a free flow-an improvised voyage to discovery. You have to budget time for random wandering.” 

~ Steve McCurry

“W. Eugene Smith’s photo essays taught me that a photograph could not only communicate emotion, but could also save the human condition”

~ Bruce Davidson

“It is perhaps an odd thing for a Brazilian to admit, but I never drink coffee and yet it runs through my veins. Indeed at several key moments in my life, coffee has played a central role in my life. I was deeply familiar with its culture which for the most part exists in silent isolation in remote mountain regions of developing countries, far from the urban homes, offices and cafes where coffee represents a dramatically different way of life.”

~ Sebastião Salgado

“Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it”

~ John Lennon

“I have never sought out the extraordinary or the scoop. The beauty of the ordinary was always the source of my greatest emotions”

~ Willy Ronis 
(1910-2009)

“Photography as I conceive it, well it’s like a drawing. An immediate sketch done with intuition and you can’t correct it. If you have to correct it, it’s the next picture. But life is very fluid.”
~ 
Henri Cartier Bresson 
(1908-2004)

"The lovely flowers embarrass me. They make me regret I am not a bee" 

~ Emily Dickinson

“Don’t count the days, make the days count.”
~ Muhammed Ali
(1942-2016)

“If I were directing a movie and I could tell Ali where to knock him down and Sonny where to fall, they’re exactly where I would put them.”
~ Neil Leifer

"I enjoy it when a work evokes something positive and dreamy, while at the same time remaining mysterious. It takes on an existential form of a poem."

~ Paul Cupido

“Photographs cannot change the world but it can show the world especially when the world is changing”

~ Marc Riboud
(1923-2016)

"I'm not so enthusiastic to have a personal style but photograph everything that moves me. I study and practice different ways to work."

~ Pentti Sammallahti

"I find the south Iceland coast to be ever compelling. The conditions of lighting and weather are constantly in transition (often quite cold and windy). Sometimes the sky, sea, and land seem to merge seemingly without separation. It’s a wondrous, vast, and elemental place. A place to find perspective."

~ Jeffrey Conley

"Looking at these images after all these years, I still have all the sensations that came to me when I was crawling around the steel work of the Golden Gate Bridge. I feel the brisk morning air, the stillness that gives way to strong breezes and howling fog. Plus apprehension from the knowledge that a careless step could result in a long plunge to San Francisco Bay. But the dramatic elements demanded prompt action. Plenty of time later to sweat over risk and anyway, in my mid-twenties it never occurred to me that I’d live beyond thirty."

~ Fred Lyon
(1924 - 2022)

"I don't believe a person has a style. What people have is a way of photographing what is inside them. What is there comes out."

~ Sebastião Salgado

“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

“When I looked at things for what they are I was fool enough to persist in my folly and found that each photograph was a mirror of myself.”

~ Minor White 
(1908-1976)

" I feel like I received the photograph, I didn't take it. If you're in the right place at the right time, then all you have to do is push a button. Being a photographer doesn't come into it. Everything I've photographed exists regardless of me, my role is only to be receptive."

~ Pentti Sammallahti

"The difference between the casual impression and the intensified image is about as great as that separating the average business letter from a poem. If you choose your subject selectively - intuitively the Camera can write poetry"

~ Harry Callahan 
(1912-1999)

"I hold this to be the highest task between two people. That each should stand guard over the solitude of the other"

~ Rainer Maria Rilke 
(1875-1926)

"Nature is a great artist, the greatest. I’ve seen rocks and forms that put Matisse, Picasso and Brancusi to shame. You can’t beat Mother Nature."

~ Brett Weston

“Photography is the language that gives people the opportunity to see what you saw.”

~ Sebastião Salgado

"I was doing an exhibition in Toronto, when I knew that Niagara Falls was not very far away, I asked the gentleman who had brought me to take me there, he refused for 4 days. The morning of the opening he tells me to take my coat and my Leica, and he takes me to the falls! When we arrived, he left me on a small mound while he went to park his car. The beauty, the sound of the water, and the joy of being there, I was really happy, that's where I took this photo, when he came back, I offered to take the walk on the boat, in front of my enthusiasm he accepted, as soon as I put my foot on the boat, I had a burst of laughter which I communicated to the other people on the boat, throughout the trip we continued to laughing without being able to stop. It was magical and beautiful. The walk lasts 15 minutes."

~ Dolores Marat

"What’s important to me is the next picture. The picture that I haven’t taken. That’s what I’m looking for"

~ Bruce Davidson

"This photograph, tells a haiku in three lines: the rock, the human (Nanae), and the bird—an adventure on the Okinawan island of Miyakojima. In Japan, I learned about the saying Kachou Fuugetsu (花⿃⾵⽉), which literally means “Flower, Bird, Wind, Moon.” While the phrase isn’t commonly used anymore, it helped me to learn a little of the language because these words are so fundamental. It translates to “Experience the beauties of nature, and in doing so, learn about yourself.” Simple words, great meaning! (I draw inspiration from Kachou Fuugetsu.)"

~ Paul Cupido

“Pat saw something in the clearing. He grasped Juanita by the hand and they hurried forward. While I followed my children into the undergrowth and the group of taller trees, how they were delighted at every little discovery. As I observed them, I suddenly realized that at that moment, in spite of everything, in spite of all the wars and all that I had gone through, that day I wanted to sing a sonnet to life and to the courage to go on living it.”

~ W. Eugene Smith

"I believe this power of seeing the world as fresh and strange lies hidden in every human being. In most of us it is dormant. Yet it is there, even if it is no more than a vague desire, an unsatisfied appetite that cannot discover its own nourishment….This should be the photographer’s aim, for this is the purpose that pictures fulfill in the world as it is to-day. To meet a need that people cannot or will not meet for themselves. We are most of us too busy, too worried, too intent on proving ourselves right, too obsessed with ideas, to stand and stare."

~ Bill Brandt
(1904-1983)

“I do what I feel, that’s all. I am an ordinary photographer working for his own pleasure. That’s all I’ve ever done"

~ Bert Hardy 
(1913-1995)

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

~ Raymond Cauchetier

“A photographer’s style, the way he or she gives shape or form to whatever they photograph, is inevitably influenced by the photographer’s past. Only by honestly building on what we have inherited can we genuinely make a new contribution. Every creative photographer is in a sense the biographer of every photographer that has gone before them”

~ Louis Stettner
(1922-2016)

“I take a lot of pictures of dogs because I like dogs, because they don't object to being photographed, and because they don't ask for prints.”

~ Elliott Erwitt
(1928 - 2023)

“I’m working because I love photography. I love the people that I photograph. I love my planet and that’s just my language”

~ Sebastião Salgado

"He had the audience in his hand right from the start. The crowd went nuts and gave him a standing ovation. Of course Dylan buzz lasted beyond, far beyond, that signature performance."

~ Rowland Scherman

"It takes the passage of time before an image of a commonplace subject can be assessed. The great difficulty of what I attempt is seeing beyond the moment; the everydayness of life gets in the way of the eternal."

~ George Tice

“Any image you see of mine is a bit meta; you can’t take it at face value,” 

~ Anastasia Samoylova

"Working initially in Japan and then further afield in Asia reaffirmed for me what many artists, such as Albers, Brandt and Rothko, had already taught me: it is not necessary, or even desirable, to fill a rectangle with details. This white field of snow, shaded from grey to white, invites me, and I hope other viewers, to wander into its open expanse, leaving our foot prints and other tracks behind, before gazing into the distance where a magical mountain appears, floating on the horizon, almost as a mirage. On the right, black trees mark the edge of a forest, suggesting a whole other point of departure. Photography records and describes, but also interprets and invites. As the world continues to spin faster and faster, I increasingly prefer to spend time away from screens, crowds and buildings, out in nature. If that is not possible, I can at least look at artworks made ion these places and get lost in my imagination."


~ Michael Kenna

“Recording the light of the outer subject can be linked with gaining access to one’s inner light”

~ Paul Caponigro
(1922-2024)

"My way of life, my very being is based on images capable of engraving themselves indelibly in our inner soul’s eye."

~ Louis Stettner

"Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree."

~ Martin Luther

"The experience I want the viewer to have with this collection of photographs is the same as when I find the images—a feeling in the body, a witness to something rare in an everyday world. Experience this. Feel this. They are an invitation to experience the natural world in an immersive way, to find and celebrate beauty in the everyday."

~ Cig Harvey

"Each time André Kertész's shutter clicks I feel his heart beating; in the Twin hole of his eye I see Pythagoras' sparkle. All this in an admirable continuity of curiosity."

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

"It is a question of luck and circumstance. I prefer winter, the worse the weather, the better the photograph will be." 

~ Pentti Sammallahti

“The camera is only a tool. It is up to the viewer to come to their own conclusion once they look at the picture based upon their experience.”

~ Earlie Hudnall

"The Road Most Traveled is one of the most personal images I’ve taken, as it features my beloved Australian Kelpie of 21 years, Blue. The image was appears in my first series and book, Within Shadows (Charta, 2011) and was shot during our daily hike in 2006 at Runyon Canyon in the Hollywood Hills. It was created with one the first handmade medium format, film cameras and lens prototypes I built over the past twenty years. Effects are achieved entirely in-camera, rather than with post-processing manipulations. Since 2005, I have created twenty-four handmade medium format film cameras, primarily made out of plastic, vintage camera parts and random household objects, with single-element lenses molded from hobby plastic and rubber. My cameras have between one and three shutter speeds, so controlling the light involves stacking numerous filters, as I do not have the luxury of multiple apertures or shutter speeds. Learning to overcome the extensive optical and technical limitations to achieve effective results has involved years of practice and refinement, especially with moving subjects, as in the case with my dog, Blue."

~ Susan Burnstine