The photo quotes that I found really inspiring from the selection I choose because they made me think to question what I’m looking at or for in a photograph or why I’m looking in the first place. This idea of asking why and also trying to be more observant of the things I am seeing while I’m always looking is in part inspired by the environmental ethics course I’m taking now where the professor has constantly asked us to just try and be more aware of the things we do notice, and perhaps more importantly the things we don’t. These quotes inspire me to be more observant because we are always looking and beyond that they inspire me to be more knowledgable and understanding of the things we look at everyday. I’ve underlined the parts of these quotes which really captures what I tried to explain above for me, and if a quote isn’t underlined I was sufficiently happy with the entire quote.
- “When people ask me what equipment I use – I tell them my eyes.”
— Anonymous - “Taking an image, freezing a moment, reveals how rich reality truly is.”
— Anonymous - “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 - “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”
— Ansel Adams
This quote is beautiful to me, similar to some of the others, because of how elegant the language and words are while advocating that words simply aren’t good enough at the same time. This specifically inspires me to take photographs in search of understanding just how inadequate words really are.
- “I wish that all of nature’s magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed.”
— Annie Leibovitz - “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 - “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 - “To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting 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 - “What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.”
— Karl Lagerfeld - “Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.”
— Peter Adams - “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 - “There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.”
— Robert Frank
The next few quotes don’t exactly follow the same theme as the first, but embrace this sense of curiosity and wonder which I hope I will always find inspiring.
- “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 - “My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.”
— Steve McCurry - “Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.”
— Imogen Cunningham