101 Inspirational and Motivational Photography Quotes
When you think about inspiration for photography, you probably think of the photos you've seen over the years.
But examining the work of other photographers isn't the only way to get your creative juices flowing...
Sometimes, an encouraging word, a funny anecdote or an interesting observation about photography is all that's needed to give you the motivation you need to take better photos.
With that in mind, we've put together a list of 101 of the most inspirational and motivational photography quotes. Have a look, and see what motivation you can draw from them!
By photo by J. Malcolm Greany [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.” - Ansel Adams
“Photography is a love affair with life.” - Burk Uzzle
“Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work.” - Martin Parr
“When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear.” - Alfred Eisenstaedt
“There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.” - Robert Frank
“A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.” - Annie Leibovitz
By unidentified (Christie's, LotFinder: entry 5176324) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Sometimes, some of the best photography quotes come from people that weren't photographers themselves, like this one by Abraham Lincoln: “There are no bad pictures; that's just how your face looks sometimes.”
“Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever… It remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.” - Aaron Siskind
“We are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us.” - Ralph Hattersley
“In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.” - Alfred Stieglitz
“Taking an image, freezing a moment, reveals how rich reality truly is.” - Anonymous
“If your pictures are not good enough, you are not close enough.” - Robert Capa
One of my favorite photography quotes is from a modern-day photographer, Destin Sparks: “Photography is the story I fail to put into words.”
Paul Strand [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
“Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.” - Paul Strand
“What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.” - John Berger
“The picture that you took with your camera is the imagination you want to create with reality.” - Scott Lorenzo
“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
“A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.” - Edward Steichen
“Photography is a small voice, at best, but sometimes one photograph, or a group of them, can lure our sense of awareness.” - W. Eugene Smith
Among the simplest of photography quotes is this one by Ansel Adams: “A good photograph is knowing where to stand.”
“It’s one thing to make a picture of what a person looks like, it’s another thing to make a portrait of who they are.” - Paul Caponigro
By Dorothea Lange, Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information / Office of Emergency Management / Resettlement Administration [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” - Dorothea Lange
“Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.” - Diane Arbus
“Photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future.” - Sally Mann
“I wish more people felt that photography was an adventure the same as life itself and felt that their individual feelings were worth expressing. To me, that makes photography more exciting.” - Harry Callahan
“The eye should learn to listen before it looks.” - Robert Frank
Here's one of the great photography quotes that reminds us to be observant, to look around, and work for the shot: “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 best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.” - Andy Warhol
Berenice Abbott [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
“Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.” - Berenice Abbott
“You don’t take a photograph. You ask quietly to borrow it.” - Unknown
“I don’t trust words. I trust pictures.” - Gilles Peress
“A tear contains an ocean. A photographer is aware of the tiny moments in a person's life that reveal greater truths.” - Anonymous
“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
How's this for one of the most mind-bending photography quotes: “Photography has nothing to do with cameras.” - Lucas Gentry
Imogen Cunningham [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
“I don't think there's any such thing as teaching people photography, other than influencing them a little. People have to be their own learners. They have to have a certain talent.” - Imogen Cunningham
“If the photographer is interested in the people in front of his lens, and if he is compassionate, it’s already a lot. The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.” - Eve Arnold
“Essentially what photography is is life lit up.” - Sam Abell
“Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.” - Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure.” - Tony Benn
“Once you learn to care, you can record images with your mind or on film. There is no difference between the two.” - Anonymous
“The camera makes you forget you’re there. It’s not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much.” - Annie Leibovitz
Ansel Adams [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
“Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.” - Ansel Adams
“I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.” - Diane Arbus
“My interest in photography is not to capture an image I see or even have in my mind, but to explore the potential of moments I can only begin to imagine.” - Lois Greenfield
“I've always believed that photography is a way to shape human perception.” - James Balog
This is one of the best photography quotes for living in such a busy world: “In a world and a life that moves so fast, photography just makes the sound go out and it makes you stop and take a pause. Photography calms me.” - Drew Barrymore
“Photography is truth.” - Jean-Luc Godard
“Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.” - Marc Riboud
“One doesn’t stop seeing. One doesn’t stop framing. It doesn’t turn off and turn on. It’s on all the time.” - Annie Leibovitz
See page for author [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
“Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.” - Ambrose Bierce
“If you see something that moves you, and then snap it, you keep a moment.” - Linda McCartney
“To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.” - Henri Cartier-Bresson
I like photography quotes that get right to the heart of what this art form is all about: “A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective.” - Irving Penn
“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” - Diane Arbus
“A lot of people think that when you have grand scenery, such as you have in Yosemite, that photography must be easy.” - Galen Rowell
“There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.” - Ansel Adams
By Rondal Partridge Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information / Office of Emergency Management / Resettlement Administration Edited and converted to JPEG by en:User:Moondigger at en.wikipedia [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
“Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.” - Dorothea Lange
“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
Photography quotes like this one remind us of the impermanence of time: “What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.” - Karl Lagerfeld
“No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.” - Robert Adams
“When people ask me what equipment I use – I tell them my eyes.” - Anonymous
“I never have taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse.” - Diane Arbus
“The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.” - Elliott Erwitt
“There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” - Ansel Adams
“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” - Susan Sontag
Ansel Adams [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” - Ansel Adams
“Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.” - Yousuf Karsh
“I wish that all of nature’s magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed.” - Annie Leibovitz
“All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.” - Richard Avedon
“If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff.” - Jim Richardson
By Wayne Miller, Photographer (NARA record: 2083745) (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
“I think good dreaming is what leads to good photographs.” - Wayne Miller
“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.” - Joan Miro
“The ratio of successful shots is one in God-knows-how-many. Sometimes you'll get several in one contact sheet, and sometimes it's none for days. But as long as you go on taking pictures, you're likely to get a good one at some point.” - 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
“Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.” - Matt Hardy
If any photography quotes are to remind us that photography requires feeling, this is it: “Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.” - Peter Adams
“Photography helps people to see.” - Berenice Abbott
Ansel Adams [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
“A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.” - Ansel Adams
“My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.” - Steve McCurry
“When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I’d like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.” - Annie Leibovitz
“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” - Henri Cartier-Bresson
“The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don’t belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation.” - Susan Meiselas
“It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.” - Alfred Eisenstaedt
“I like to photograph anyone before they know what their best angles are.” - Ellen Von Unwerth
“When I photograph, what I’m really doing is seeking answers to things.” - Wynn Bullock
Elliott Erwitt, by Alfred Weidinger [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
“Photography is pretty simple stuff. You just react to what you see, and take many, many pictures.” - Elliott Erwitt
“Life is like a camera. Just focus on what’s important and capture the good times, develop from the negatives and if things don’t work out, just take another shot.” - Unknown
“Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.” - Imogen Cunningham
“One advantage of photography is that it's visual and can transcend language.” - Lisa Kristine
“In the world of photography, you get to share a captured moment with other people.” - James Wilson
“In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.” - August Sander
“Once photography enters your bloodstream, it is like a disease.” - Anonymous
“Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.” - Yousuf Karsh
“It’s weird that photographers spend years or even a whole lifetime, trying to capture moments that added together, don’t even amount to a couple of hours.” - James Lalropuii Keivom
Lewis Hine [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
“If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug around a camera.” - Lewis Hine
“Only photograph what you love.” - Tim Walker
“There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.” - Ansel Adams
“I'm so drawn to photography because you can convey a complex story in a single frame.” - Gia Coppola
“First you study photography, then you practice photography, then you serve photography, and finally one becomes photography.” - Ralph Gibson
“Photography has always been a major part of my vision: my excuse for meddling with what the world looks like.” - Robert Rauschenberg
“To me, the magic of photography, per se, is that you can capture an instant of a second that couldn't exist before and couldn't exist after. It's almost like a cowboy that draws his gun. You draw a second before or after, you miss and you're dead - not them. To me, photography's always like that.” - Mario Testino