Wall of quotes on photography

• 'It's about reacting to what you see, hopefully without preconception. 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'. Elliot Erwitt

• 'Photography is not about the thing being photographed.  It is about how that thing looks photographed'. Garry Winogrand

• 'If I am looking for a story at all, it is in my relationship to the subject - the story that tells me, rather than that I tell'.  Bruce Davidson

• 'A photo is a small voice, at best, but sometimes - just sometimes - one photograph or a group of them can lure our senses into awareness. Much depends upon the viewer. In some, photographs can summon enough emotion to be a catalyst to thought'. Eugene W Smith

• 'Each picture has 2 levels. The first is content, its rational and emotional message. The second is composition, its structure of graphic elements and colour as the vehicle to convey content. There is no content without composition. and no composition without content'. Harald Mante (modified for clarity)

• 'Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst'. Henri Cartier-Bresson

• 'The painter constructs, the photographer discloses'. Susan Sontag  

• 'You do not take a photograph, you make it'. Ansel Adams

• 'A photograph is not accident, it is a concept'. Ansel Adams

• 'There is nothing worse than a brilliant image but a fuzzy concept'. Ansel Adams

• 'Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still'. 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 Carrier-Bresson

• 'A photograph isn't necessarily a lie, but nor is it the truth. It's more of a fleeting, subjective impression. What I most like about photography is the moment that you can't anticipate: you have to be constantly watching for it, ready to welcome the unexpected'. Martine Franks

• 'Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph'. Matt Hardy

• 'I am forever chasing light. Light turns the ordinary into the magical'. Trent Parke

• 'A photograph is not created by a photographer. What he does is just to open a little window and capture it. The world then writes itself on the film. The act of the photographer is closer to reading than it is to writing. They are the readers of the world'. Ferdinando Scianna

• 'What is important in my work is the individual picture. I photograph stories on assignment, and of course they have to be put together coherently. But what matters most is that each picture stands on its own, with its own place and feeling'. Steve McCurry

•  'Photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world'. Bruno Barbey

• 'If your photographs are not good enough, you are not close enough'. Robert Capa

• 'Photography is still instinct. But I am more disciplined now. I am trying to make each frame count, just as every Tai Chi breath counts'. Chien-Chi Chang

• 'A photograph is a subjective impression. It is what the photographer sees. No matter how hard we try to get into the skin, into the feeling of the subject or situation, however much we empathize, it is still what we see that comes out in the images, it is our reaction to the subject and in the end, the whole corpus of our work becomes a portrait of ourselves'.  Marilyn Silverstone

• 'Shadow is mystery and light is clarity. Shadow conceals—light reveals. To know what to reveal and what to conceal, and in what degrees to do this, is all there is to art'. Josef von Sternberg