The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
Dorothea Lange
Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.
Henri Cartier Bresson
Light glorifies everything. It transforms and ennobles the most commonplace and ordinary subjects. The object is nothing; light is everything.
Leonard Misonne
Of course, there will always be those who look only at technicque, who ask "how," while others of a more curious nature will ask "why." Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.
Man ray
No matter how slow the film, spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer it has chosen.
Minor White
Many pictures turn out to be limp translations of the known world instead of vital objects which create an intrinsic world of their own. There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph.
Robert Heinecken
The photograph isolates and perpetuates a moment of time: an important and revealing moment, or an unimportant and meaningless one, depending upon the photographer's understanding of his subject and mastery of his process.
Edward Weston
If you are not passionately devoted to an idea, you can make very pleasant pictures but they won't make you cry.
Ruth Bernhard
Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
Susan Sontag
The two most engaging powers of a photographer are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.
W. Thackeray
The meaning of quality in photography's best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system.
Walker Evans
What I feel is that the picture-taking process, anyway a greater part of it, is an intuitive thing. You can't go out and logically plan a picture, but when you come back, reason then takes over and verifies or rejects whatever you've done. So that's why I say that reason and intuition are not in conflict--they strengthen each other.
Wynn Bullock
Pictures are wasted unless the motive power which impelled you to action is strong and stirring.
Berenice Abbott
Anything more than 500 yds from the car just isn't photogenic.
Edward Weston
The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks!
Henri Cartier-Bresson