Top 1200 Professional Photographer Quotes & Sayings

What is right? Simply put, it is any assignment in which the photographer has a significant spiritual stake... spiritually driven work constitutes the core of a photographer's contribution to culture.

One thing that Life and I agreed right from the start was that one war photographer was enough for my family; I was to be a photographer of peace.

I'm an amateur photographer, apart from being a professional one, and I think maybe my amateur pictures are the better ones.

Photographer James Nachtwey has spent his professional life in the places people most want to avoid: war zones and refugee camps, the city flattened by an earthquake, the village swallowed by a flood, the farm hollowed out by famine.

I'm a photographer, period. I love photography, the immediacy of it. I like the craft, the idea of saying 'I'm a photographer.'

I've never not been sure that I was a photographer any more than you would not be sure you were yourself. I was a photographer, or wanting to be a photographer, or beginning - but some phase of photographer I've always been.

My Dad took a workshop from a photographer who worked at the Toledo Blade, a newspaper I delivered. I knew this photographer's work. My Dad took a night class from him at the University of Toledo. Without that class, I wouldn't have become a photographer, because my Dad came home and taught me what he learned in class.

Any photographer worth his/her salt - that is, any photographer of professional caliber, in control of the craft, regardless of imagistic bent - can make virtually anything look good. Which means, of course, that she or he can make virtually anything look bad - or look just about any way at all. After all, that is the real work of photography: making things look, deciding how a thing is to appear in the image.

A photographer who wants to see, a photographer who wants to make fine images, must recognize the value in the familiar.

I didn't want to be a woman photographer. That would limit me. I wanted to be a photographer who was a woman, with all the world open to my camera.

It used to bug me that I couldn't even afford to take my family for a proper holiday. I didn't have any professional knowledge, and getting a photographer's job in a magazine was out of the question. So, armed with a Pentax K1000, I started going to various maidans of Mumbai, looking for subjects.

I am a professional photographer because it is the best way I know to earn the money I require to take care of my wife and children.

I feel like I'm a professional. I've been a professional for a number of years. I'm a businesswoman and a tax lawyer and a professional and so that's how I treat other people.

... the photographer is a thief who chooses what he steals (which, at this stage of the crisis, is a luxury) and does not democratize the image, that is to say, the photographer selects the pictures, a privilege which ought to be granted to the person being photographed.

I was born in the Bay Area because my dad was a semi-professional photographer and poet who was really into John Coltrane. He's had many lives. My dad's a capitalist to his bone, but he's also a human to his bone.

A photographer cannot be inexperienced, or too mature. A photographer ought to be half-ripe.

You do your work as a photographer and everything becomes past. Words are more like thoughts; the photographer's picture is always surrounded by a kind of romantic glamor - no matter what you do, and how you twist it.

Forget about the profession of being a photographer. First be a photographer and maybe the profession will come after.

A photographer is a photographer and an artist is an artist. I don't believe in labels or titles. Why should a painter or sculptor who has probably never challenged the rules be an artist just because his title and an art school education automatically make him one.

A photographer is a witness. He has a moral duty. Every picture must be true and honest. I believe a photographer's strength is his ability to accurately record reality. There are photographers who think they are lucky if they find unusual or special subject. But it is never the subject that is so marvelous. It is how alive and real the photographer can make it.

Sometimes a photographer is a passenger, sometimes a person who stays in one place. What he watches changes constantly, but his watching never changes. He doesn't examine like a doctor, defend like a lawyer, analyze like a scholar, support like a priest, make people laugh like a comedian, or intoxicate like a singer. He only watches. This is enough. No, this is all I can do. All a photographer can do is watch. Therefore, a photographer has to watch all the time. He must face the object and make his entire body an eye. A photographer is someone who wagers everything on seeing.

To be on time, to eat well like a professional, to sleep like a professional. To train and play like a professional. I encourage everyone to do this every day.

For a short time I was an assistant to a professional photographer, and I felt that my soul was not there. That is the stage when I decided to stay in London and do a graduate degree.

I think not being a professional photographer was actually a blessing, because it allowed me to shoot things professional photographers wouldn't shoot, or wouldn't try or attempt to shoot without lights. So I did all my stuff natural and without lights.

The difference between an amateur and a professional photographer is that the amateur thinks the camera does the work. And they treat the camera with a certain amount of reverence. It is all about the kind of lens you choose, the kind of film stock you use… exactly the sort of perfection of the camera. Whereas, the professional the real professional – treats the camera with unutterable disdain. They pick up the camera and sling it aside. Because they know it’s the eye and the brain that count, not the mechanism that gets between them and the subject that counts.

What some highbrows call rapport is nothing more than a mild flirtation between photographer and the girl on the other side of the camera. Some models get so professional they can send hours flirting with the camera itself while the poor photographer is reduced to the role of spectator.

Fantasy isn't something I put into the pictures; I don't try and inject them with a sense of play. But it's about being an honest photographer; a photograph is as much of a mirror of the photographer as it is the subject.

When I first started to take photographs in Czechoslovakia, I met this old gentleman, this old photographer, who told me a few practical things. One of the things he said was, "Josef, a photographer works on the subject, but the subject works on the photographer."

Who is a professional? A professional is someone who has a combination of competence, confidence and belief. A water diviner is a professional. A traditional midwife is a professional. A traditional bone setter is a professional. These are professionals all over the world. You find them in any inaccessible village around the world.

As a professional photographer I take photographs for other people to see - but I want them to see what I see. So I never assume that only a few people will appreciate what I do. At all times, the public should be able to understand what I've done, even if they don't understand how I've done it.

The photographer’s vision convinces us to the degree that the photographer hides his hand.

If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.

Being a digital photographer I'm in awe of the older generation of photographers who created all those iconic cinematic style images on film, such as Man Ray's portrait of the photographer Lee Miller.

[Photography] underlines the photographer. That's the Barthesian this has been. Well, this has been for the photographer as well. The photographer is the hidden placeholder in the Barthesian equation.

I was fooling around one day and looking at Yahoo! Jobs. I typed in "photo" and, of course, what comes up is "One hour photo lab" or "Be a photographer in Disneyland" or jobs that no one really wants as a photographer. I saw, by chance, this ad that said, "Wanted: Photographer for premieres and Hollywood events" and I thought, "This can not be real. This is ridiculous. No one advertizes this!" I was really suspect about it.

A photographer's main instrument is his eyes. Strange as it may seem, many photographers choose to use the eyes of another photographer, past or present, instead of their own. Those photographers are blind.

What is right? Simply put, it is any assignment in which the photographer has a significant spiritual stake...spiritually driven work constitutes the core of a photographer's contribution to culture.

If the chemistry is right between star and photographer and the geometry of the pictures pleases the star, often the two people end up with a long-term professional friendship during which they continue to work together and to produce highly personal images.

I used to call myself a war photographer. Now I consider myself as an antiwar photographer.

As a professional climber and photographer, I am asked to shoot in a lot of situations with a lot of different people. Sometimes I'm with the hardest, most seasoned alpinists in the world. Sometimes I'm hanging out with celebrities doing a benefit climb.

I thought that choosing a non-professional was a condition for me, because it would allow Juliette to have a less-professional way of acting. It would challenge her performance as a professional actress.

A poor photographer meets chance one out of a hundred times and a good photographer meets chance all the time.

This idea fascinates me. The idea that a few seconds of watching a photographer in action can tell you his/her status in the medium. And it's true. If you watch a photographer of merit working an event he/she does not look like an amateur.

I became a photographer in order to be a war photographer, and a photographer involved in what I thought were critical social issues. From the very beginning this was my goal.

Well, I'm not going to get into that. I think that those kind of distinctions and lists of titles like "street photographer" are so stupid. I'm a photographer, a still photographer. That's it.

Thus, during the winter of 2003 I ventured into a new arena as a professional photographer.

The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.

I'm in between an installation artist, video artist and photographer. And when you work with nude bodies, you're immediately called a pornographer or a fashion photographer.

I came up, I suppose, a fairly traditional way. I went to art college. I always wanted to be a stills photographer, really, when I was younger, and I briefly worked as a stills photographer.

I'm the world's most famous photographer, most sought after photographer, most awarded photographer.

The creative life of the commercial photographer is like the life of a butterfly. Very seldom do we see a photographer who is really productive for more than eight or ten years.

When I gave up my office job and became a full-time professional photographer, my fortunes certainly improved markedly. We moved away from the council estate into our own house and for the first time in my life, I had a little spare money.

A photographer without imagination is not a good photographer.

... the possibility of one particular photographer's pictures lying around the corner is never realized until the photographer is there. It's one of the enigmas of photography.

The art schools seem to be trying to turn people out as "professional." But I don't know what the word "professional" means any longer. "Professional" would be somebody who was trying to push painting to a point that nobody else could do as well as he could. That would be my ideal professional.

I am a professional photographer by trade and an amateur photographer by vocation.

This is how you can tell a real photographer: mostly, a real photographer does not say 'I wish I had my camera on me right now'. Instead a real photographer pulls out her camera and takes the photograph.

You know, the Chinese don't like to be photographed because they believe that a part of their life is being taken away by the photographer. And in a way, they're right. The photographer is trying to get the prettiest moment of a life in his camera.

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.

In England, I'm already labeled a rock photographer, which is a little insulting, because I'm not a rock photographer at all.