Photography Inspiration Quotes

I'll always be an amateur photographer.

Light inspires me. I'm drawn to architecture, often graves, statues, trees - things usually that are quite still. I've been taking pictures continuously since 1995 until the end of Polaroid film. I'm taking very few pictures nowadays because I have very little film left, most of it expired.

People assumed we called the record 'Murray Street' because of its proximity to the World Trade Centre, but that wasn't it at all. Before the attacks, I had simply been walking around taking pictures of things, and I had this photograph of the street sign. We felt it was somewhat evocative and decided to use it on the back cover of the album.

I started photography more or less by accident when I was already 27. I was taken on as an assistant by a photographer who was a friend of a friend and I very quickly understood the potential of expression in photography.

My youngest son becomes an award-winning nature photographer, and I cannot resist writing poems to his pictures. My daughter loves to cook, though I do not. Yet together, we write a cookbook with fairy tales. And now a second.

I guess I've shot about 40,000 negatives and of these I have about 800 pictures I like.

I have often photographed when I am not in tune with nature but the photographs look as if I had been. So I conclude that something in nature says, 'Come and take my photograph.' So I do, regardless of how I feel.

What you need to be a good photographer is an overwhelming curiosity and a good digestion.

There's no great mystique to photography. A lot of photographers like to put their hands up to their forehead and tell you how they've suffered and so forth. Well, I just rent a car and drive to the place and take the pictures.

My name is Weegee. I'm the world's greatest photographer.

A lot of photographers like models to be blank canvases - but bland girls don't influence me. I don't like playing with dolls; I like playing with people.

A work of art is itself an object, first of all, and so manipulation is unavoidable: it's a prerequisite. But I needed the greater objectivity of the photograph in order to correct my own way of seeing: for instance, if I draw an object from nature, I start to stylize and to change it in accordance with my personal vision and my training. But if I paint from a photograph, I can forget all the criteria that I get from these sources. I can paint against my will, as it were. And that, to me, felt like an enrichment.

I didn't see painters doing paintings of glassware and glass shelves or sand dunes and receding snow fences. Why does that interest photographers and not artists?

But I did not always know just what it was I wanted to photograph. I believe it is important for a photographer to discover this, for unless he finds what it is that excites him, what it is that calls forth at once an emotional response, he is unlikely to achieve his best work.

I believe that the source of your inspiration is very important. I sometimes see this problem with photographers, even very good ones, who have drawn too much inspiration from photography and who, over time, have a problem forming their own identity.

I don't look at other photographs much at all. I don't know why. I study my own a lot.

I have mixed feelings about those sorts of things. When I see it done by interesting young people, I think it's very valid. But when established photographers, people in their forties, copy me and get a lot of money, well, I find that to be very stupid.

I've been really interested and inspired by Nan Goldin, the photographer.

I’ve said about a million times that the best thing a young photographer can do is to stay close to home. Start with your friends and family, the people who will put up with you. Discover what it means to be close to your work, to be intimate with a subject. Measure the difference between that and working with someone you don't know as much about. Of course there are many good photographs that have nothing to do with staying close to home, and I guess what I'm really saying is that you should take pictures of something that has meaning for you

The greatest compliment that I know how to pay another photographer is to say, 'I never would have made that photograph myself. I'm sure glad you did.' You hope along the way that maybe, once in a while, you do that for someone else.

It quickly came to be that I grew interested in photographing whatever was there wherever I happened to be. For any reason.

We were taking some photos one day in front of one of these old antebellum homes, and one of us said the word. And we all kind of stopped and said, 'That could be a name!' ... It just feels kind of country and nostalgic.

There are a lot of photographers who have influenced me; some of the great ones, like Herb Ritts, Helmut Newton, and [Alfred] Stieglitz. I draw from all of them. You're supposed to steal from the good ones.

I can see the character in a photograph, in the way a guy stands or holds his hands, the way he buckles his belt. I fantasize a lot looking at photographs. I'm sure that doesn't work for many people.

I'm not drawn to people that much unless there's a really serious energy happening, but I'll take a lot of pictures of trees, or I'm always staring at the ground. I'll see an oil stain that looks like something out of 'Lord of the Rings' or something, and that's what kind of calls to me... I'm drawn to that aspect of photography.