COLLECTION OF QUOTATIONS

By Steven Yee

I fell in love with taking pictures, with wandering around finding things. To me, it feels like a kind of performance. The picture is a document of that performance. – Alec Soth

A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you. – Brigitte Bardot

If you are out there shooting, things will happen for you. If you’re not out there, you’ll only hear about it. – Jay Maisel

What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce. – Karl Lagerfeld

I don’t care so much anymore about ‘good photography’; I am gathering evidence for history. – Gilles Peress

A decisive moment stops movement but also provokes thought. – Matt Black

A photograph has picked up a fact of life, and that fact will live forever. – Raghu Rai

We are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us. – Ralph Hattersley

The photograph is completely abstracted from life, yet it looks like life. That is what has always excited me about photography. – Richard Kalvar

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. – Sebastiao Salgado

Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst. – Henri Cartier-Bresson

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. – Susan Sontag

Street Photography is like fishing. Catching the fish is more exciting than eating it… – Thomas Leuthard

“Seeing is not enough; you have to feel what you photograph.”
-Andre Kertesz

‘Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.’
George Addair

‘If you can smell the street by looking at the photo, it’s a street photograph.’
Bruce Gilden

‘There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. 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. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.’
Henri Cartier-Bresson

‘Seeing is not enough; you have to feel what you photograph.’
Andre Kertesz

‘If your photos aren’t good enough, then you’re not close enough.’
Robert Capa

‘I only know how to approach a place by walking. For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown, or the secret heat of the known awaits just around the corner.‘
Alex Webb

‘The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things in words.’
Elliott Erwitt

‘I love the people I photograph. I mean, they’re my friends. I’ve never met most of them or I don’t know them at all, yet through my images I live with them.’
Bruce Gilden

‘There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.’
Ernst Haas

‘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.’
Elliott Erwitt

“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.” –Elliott Erwitt

“The pictures are there, and you just take them.”
Robert Capa

“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

“If you take photographs, don’t speak, don’t write, don’t analyse yourself, and don’t answer any questions.”
Robert Doisneau

“I have a very good memory, but it’s short. Thank god for photography.”
John E. Burkowski

“When you photograph people in colour you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their souls!”
Ted Grant

“Photography is like making cheese. It takes a hell of a lot of milk to make a small amount of cheese just like it takes a hell of a lot of photos to get a good one.”
Robert Gillis

“There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.”
Ansel Adams

“I have the great privilege of being both witness and storyteller. Intimacy, trust and intuition guide my work.” – Jim Goldberg

“Most of my photos are grounded in people, I look for the unguarded moment, the essential soul peeking out, experience etched on a persons face.” Steve McCurry

“When I use the camera, I often feel likeI know part of the people or places I come in contact with.” – Christophe Agou

“Looking and seeing are two different things. What matters is the relationship with the subject.” – Christophe Agou

”During the work, you have to be sure that you haven’t left any holes, that you’ve captured everything, because afterwards it will be too late.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

”Which of my photographs is my favourite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.” – Imogen Cunningham

”All photography is propaganda.” – Martin Parr

”A good photograph is knowing where to stand.” – Ansel Adams

”Sharpness is a bourgeois concept.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson

”It’s not the photographer that makes the picture, but the person being photographed.” – Sebastiao Salgado

”The only ‘bad light’ is the absence of light altogether.” – Anonymous

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.
Elliott Erwitt

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

It’s neither our culture nor our race which
interconnects us. It’s Street Photography.
Thomas Leuthard

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.
Dorothea Lange

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv.
Henri Cartier-Bresson

The eye should learn to listen before it looks.
Robert Frank

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 extraordinary.
David Bailey

All the technique in the world doesn’t compensate for the inability to notice.
Elliott Erwitt

Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.
Joe McNally

My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.
Steve McCurry

I have problems with a lot of photography, particularly street photography and photojournalism – objectifying the other, finding the contempt and exoticism that you might feel within yourself or toward yourself and projecting it out to others. There can be an abusive power to photography, too.
Barbara Kruger

“Just go out and shoot! It’s great to get inspired by reading books and watching tutorials and so forth, but you need to actually go out and take pictures. Don’t be afraid to get out there.” Valerie Jardin

“Street photography is about finding the heart and soul of people in the city. Be bold and spontaneous — not everyone will like their photograph captured. Fear nothing and conquer fright! Delight yourself in that you are a storyteller and that history will one day remember you.” Emmanuel Munano

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

“It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.” Alfred Eisenstaedt
“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.” David Bailey

“I blend in the scenery and catch a moment where people are so involved with what they’re doing that they don’t notice me with my camera. The photographer needs to be pretty ballsy, or simply quicker than the subject.” Markus Hartel

https://www.keenanrivals.com/journal//ten-of-my-favorite-street-photography-quotes

“I think good dreaming is what leads to good photographs.” – Wayne Miller

”I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.” – Garry Winogrand