You Don’t Take A Photograph, You Make It

Ansel Adams
“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”

Ansel Adams
“You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.”

Diane Arbus
“A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.”

Susan Sontag
“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.”

Marc Riboud
“Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.”

Eudora Welty
“A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.”

“When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!”

Abraham Lincoln
“There are no bad pictures; that’s just how your face looks sometimes.”

Dorothea Lange
“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”

Ansel Adams
“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”

Kate Morton
“It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down….”

Susan Sontag
“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”

Mahatma Gandhi
“I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson
“For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.”

Ansel Adams
“To the complaint, ‘There are no people in these photographs,’ I respond, There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.”

Ansel Adams
“A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson
“To photograph is to hold one’s breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.”

Kim Edwards
“Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell.”

Susan Sontag
“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”

Ansel Adams
“Sometimes I arrive just when God’s ready to have somone click the shutter.”

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

Salman Rushdie
“A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second. ”

George Bernard Shaw

Ansel Adams
“A photograph is usually looked at- seldom looked into.”

Ansel Adams
“There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.”

Robert Frank
“Above all, life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference”