1.A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.
2.A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.
3.The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.
4.In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.
5.If you can smell the street by looking at the photo, it’s a street photograph.
6.My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.
7.I wish that all of nature’s magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed.
8.If I have any ‘message’ worth giving to a beginner it is that there are no shortcuts in photography.
9.I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost.
10.You cannot possibly hit the shutter without leaving a piece of you in the image.
11.When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.
12.The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.
13.It’s one thing to make a picture of what a person looks like, it’s another thing to make a portrait of who they are.
14.No, you don’t shoot things. You capture them. Photography means painting with light. And that’s what you do. You paint a picture only by adding light to the things you see.
15.Photography has no rules, it is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it is achieved.
16.A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.
17.To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk.
18.To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.
19.All the planning, intuition, technical prowess, and knowledge, as well as the trust and rapport you have (or haven’t) established, will show up in the picture, frozen forever.
20.Sometimes one waits too long for the perfect moment before snapping the picture. You never realize that you needed was to change perspective.
21.A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective.
22.When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I’d like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.
23.A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.
24.What I have learnt and what I teach now is all about experimentation and learning to pick yourself up and try again when you fall down.
25.Whatever happens in front of the lens stays. What’s captured during the encounter is all that exists.
26.A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you.
27.You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.
28.Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn’t look like somebody else’s work.
29.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.
30.A photojournalist makes snap decisions; based on the ability to quickly assess situations and record one’s perceived truth.
31.The world moves fast, changing everything around us with each new day. Photography is a gift that can keep us in a moment forever, blissfully eternal.
32.We don’t learn from our good images; we learn from the ones that can be improved on.
33.Photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future.
34.Fear is the thing that prohibits a lot of photographers from reaching their full potential.
35.What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.
36.The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.
37.Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.
38.Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality…One can’t possess reality, one can possess images–one can’t possess the present but one can possess the past.
39.A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is thereby a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.
40.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.
41.Yes, it took me just a moment to draw this line with the brush. But it took me months, perhaps even years, of reflection to form the idea.
42.When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.
43.What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
44.If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff.
45.The best images are the ones that retain their strength and impact over the years, regardless of the number of times they are viewed.
46.When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!
47.To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place…I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.
48.To me, a photograph means the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the meaning of an event on the one hand and the exact arrangement of the visually perceived forms expressing that event on the other.
49.Art is what we call…the thing an artist does. It’s not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human. Art is not in the …eye of the beholder. It’s in the soul of the artist.
50.John White, another Pulitzer Prize winning photographer at the Sun-Times once told me he photographed every sunrise. In disbelief, I inquired why? He simply said he didn’t want to miss the really great one.
51.For me, documentary photography has always come with great responsibility. Not just to tell the story honestly and with empathy, but also to make sure the right people hear it. When you photograph somebody who is in pain or discomfort, they trust you to make sure the images will act as their advocate.