I have often been accused of deliberately deforming nature to make it suit my own point of view. Above all, I know that the photographer cannot envisage life with an indifferent eye. Any opinion involves an element of criticism. But criticism can be prompted by love. It is important to see what remains hidden to other people, whether it is a gleam of hope or sadness. Photography moreover always remains the instinctive reaction of the operator towards himself. -Robert Frank
 

Quality doesn't mean deep blacks and whatever tonal range. That's not quality, that's a kind of quality. The pictures of Robert Frank might strike someone as being sloppy--the tone range isn't right and things like that--but they're far superior to the pictures of Ansel Adams with regard to quality, because the quality of Ansel Adams, if I may say so, is essentially the quality of a postcard. But the quality of Robert Frank is a quality that has something to do with what he's doing, what his mind is. It's not balancing out the sky to the sand and so forth. It's got to do with intention. -Eliott Erwitt

You can find pictures anywhere. It's simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what's around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy. -Eliott Erwit

It's just seeing - at least the photography I care about. You either see or you don't see. The rest is academic. Anyone can learn how to develop. It's how you organize what you see into a picture. -Eliott Erwitt

Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long. -Walker Evans
 
What moves me about...what's called technique...is that it comes from some mysterious deep place. I mean it can have something to do with the paper and the developer and all that stuff, but it comes mostly from some very deep choices somebody has made that take a long time and keep haunting them. -Diane Arbus
 
Some pictures are tentative forays without your even knowing it. They become methods. It's important to take bad pictures. It's the bad ones that have to do with what you've never done before. They can make you recognize something you hadn't seen in a way that will make you recognize it when you see it again. -Diane Arbus
 
...the eye and the camera see more than the mind knows. -Nathan Lyons

Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed. -Garry Winogrand

You know, he (Winogrand) set a tempo on the street so strong that it was impossible not to follow it. It was like jazz. You just had to get in the same groove... You know, if you hesitate, forget it. You don't have to learn to unleash that. It was like having a hair trigger. Sometimes walking down the street, wanting to make a picture, I would be so anticipatory, so anxious, that I would just have to fire the camera, to let fly a picture, in order to release the energy, so that I could recock it. That's what you got from Garry. It came off him in waves - to be keyed up, eager, excited for pictures in that way. -Joel Meyerowitz

Sharpness is a bourgeois concept. -Henri Cartier-Bresson
 
If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough. -Robert Capa

All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth. -Richard Avedon,
1984
  
While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph. -Lewis Hine
  
When I shoot a picture of somebody who's really seriously hurt, there's an unspoken exchange. Even if I could speak the language, I could not formulate the question, which is: "Can I take your picture?" In that situation, taking a photograph for the sake of taking a photograph is very trivial. The challenge is finding the language to say, "Can I take your picture in a way that is meaningful?" You don't do it with words. You do it with the eyes.
You're present there with them and they know that you have a question to ask. They read your body language and they decide whether to show themselves or to hide, whether they want to be photographed. They answer with their own unspoken language. I mean, you see it right away. You can feel it right away. It's in the eyes, and they tell you, "Yes, I want you to show this to the world." -Gilles Peress

Dedicated to the real photographers of the world - to those who, with their second-hand equipment and their makeshift darkrooms, are today fighting their solitary battles with their recalcitrant medium, not for money or for glory, but because they would rather make pictures than anything else in the world. -William Mortensen

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

The enemy of photography is the convention, the fixed rules of 'how to do.’  The salvation of photography comes from the experiment. -Anonymous
 
Photography teaches that how well you see has nothing to do with how well you see. -Anonymous

There are no rules and regulations for perfect composition. If there were we would be able to put all the information into a computer and would come out with a masterpiece. We know that's impossible. You have to compose by the seat of your pants. -Arnold Newman
 
You become things, you become an atmosphere, and if you become it, which means you incorporate it within you, you can also give it back. You can put this feeling into a picture. A painter can do it. And a musician can do it and I think a photographer can do that too and that I would call the dreaming with open eyes. -Ernst Haas
 
The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking. -Brooks Anderson, 1951, "Once Around the Sun"
 
I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost--that is important. If they are art objects at the same time, that's fine with me. -Jacques-Henri Lartigue

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet. -Orson Welles
 
If you look at a photograph, and you think, 'My, isn't that a beautiful photograph,' and you go on to the next one, or 'Isn't that nice light?' so what? I mean what does it do to you or what's the real value in the long run? What do you walk away from it with? I mean, I'd much rather show you a photograph that makes demands on you,that you might become involved in on your own terms or be perplexed by. -Duane Michals
 
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. -Andre Kertesz
 
The word 'art' is very slippery. It really has no importance in relation to one's work. I work for the pleasure, for the pleasure of the work, and everything else is a matter for the critics. -Manuel Alvarez Bravo

Searching is everything - going beyond what you know. And the test of the search is really in the things themselves, the things you seek to understand. What is important is not what you think about them, but how they enlarge you. -Wynn Bullock
 

The urge to create, the urge to photograph, comes in part from the deep desire to live with more integrity, to live more in peace with the world, and possibly to help others to do the same. -Wynn Bullock
 
I always wanted to be a photographer. I was fascinated with the materials.
But I never dreamed I would be having this much fun. I imagined something much less elusive, much more mundane. -Lee Friedlander

And if a day goes by without doing something related to photography, it’s as though I've neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up. I know the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible -Richard Avedon

It's about time we started to take photography seriously and treat it as a hobby. -Eliott Erwitt

Michael P. Farrell