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Famous Photography Quotes

Is Photography Art?

Here are some great famous photography quotes on the big question: Is photography art? Stimulating and pithy insights from major cultural figures and big name photographers.

We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium. Ansel Adams

Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art. Ansel Adams

Photographers feel guilty that all they do for a living is press a button. Andy Warhol

I paint when I cannot photograph. Man Ray

I have discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn. Pablo Picasso

The camera, you know, will never capture you. Photography, in my experience, has the miraculous power of transferring wine into water. Oscar Wilde

...it does seem to me that Capa has proved beyond all doubt that the camera need not be a cold mechanical device. Like the pen, it is as good as the man who uses it. It can be the extension of mind and heart... John Steinbeck

In every photographer there was a painter, a true artist, awaiting expression. Pablo Picasso

Nature does not create works of art. It is we, and the faculty of interpretation peculiar to the human mind, that see art. Man Ray

If it is practiced by a man of taste, the photograph will have the appearance of art (but) the photographer must... intervene as little as possible, so as not...to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses. Henri Matisse

In the same spirit, when the automobile arrived, there were those that declared the horse to be the most perfect form of locomotion. Man Ray

As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art. Susan Sontag

Two of the most frustrated trades are dentists and photographers - dentists because they want to be doctors, and photographers because they want to be painters. Pablo Picasso

I am sure the next step will be the electronic image, and I hope I shall live to see it. I trust that the creative eye will continue to function, whatever technological innovations may develop. Ansel Adams