Welcome to the world’s largest photo quotation resource. These are not tired old quotes scammed from online sources and passed around like stale donuts at a committee meeting. This photo quote collection is the uniquely flavored creation of a single intelligence, not a group effort or a corporate product.

You’ll find thousands of fresh quotes on photography, with more added constantly. They’re hand-selected to inform, confound, and provoke. Browse photo quotes by author, of course, but you can also engage with the quotations by subject. In fact, the photo quotes are available in three clusters of subjects—Themes, Oppositions, and On Photography.  Plunge in. Get smart. Be challenged. Cause trouble.  —Quoteman

Siegfried Kracauer
[Media critic and sociologist, b. 1889, Frankfurt, Germany, d. 1966, New York.]

 The photograph annihilates the person. 

Lee Miller
[Photographer and model, b. 1907, Poughkeepsie, New York, d. 1976, Sussex, England.]

 [Being a great photojournalist is] a matter of getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you. 

David Hockney
[Artist, b. 1937, Bradford, England, lives in Bridlington, Yorkshire; London; and Los Angeles.]

 All religions are about social control. The church, when it had social control, commissioned paintings, which were made using lenses and when it stopped commissioning images, its power declined, slowly. Social control today is in the media—and based on photography. The continuum is the mirrors and lenses. 

Jorge Luis Borges
[Writer, poet, and librarian, b. 1899, Buenos Aires, Argentina, d. 1986, Geneva, Switzerland.]

 Islam asserts that on the unappealable Day of Judgment every perpetrator of the image of a living creature will be raised from the dead with his works, and he will be commanded to bring them to life, and he will fail, and be cast out with them into the fires of punishment. 

Wim Wenders
[Artist and filmmaker, b. 1945, Düsseldorf, lives in Berlin.]

 Every photo, every “once” in time is also the beginning of a story “once upon a time.” Every photo is the first frame of a movie. 

Luigi Ghirri
[Photographer, b. 1943, Scandiano, Italy, d. 1992, Reggio Emilia, Italy.]

 Reality is being transformed into a colossal photograph, and the montage already exists: it’s called the real world. 

 Paradoxically perhaps… the moment a photographer thinks he is showing us reality is the moment when it is most distant. 

Günter Grass
[Writer, b. 1927, Danzig, Germany (now Gdansk, Poland), d. 2015, Lübeck, Germany.]

 [To be an artist,] this desire to conquer all with images.