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

Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]

 I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do—that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it I felt very perverse. 

Jean Baudrillard
[Writer and theorist, b. 1929, Reims, France, d. 2007, Paris.]

 You think you photograph a particular scene for the pleasure it gives. In fact it’s the scene that wants to be photographed. You’re merely an extra in the production. 

Rineke Dijkstra
[Photographer, b. 1959, Sittard, The Netherlands, lives in Amsterdam.]

 For me it is essential to understand that everyone is alone. Not in the sense of loneliness, but rather in the sense that no one can completely understand someone else. I know very well what Diane Arbus means when she says that one cannot crawl into someone else’s skin, but there is always an urge to do so anyway. I want to awaken definite sympathies for the person I have photographed. 

Robert Morris
[Artist and theorist, b. 1931, Kansas City, Missouri, lives in New York.]

 There is probably no defense against the malevolent powers of the photograph to convert every visible aspect of the world into a static, consumable image. 

Chuck Close
[Artist, b. 1940, Monroe, Washington, lives in New York.]

 It always amazes me that just when I think there’s nothing left to do in photography and that all permutations and possibilities have been exhausted, someone comes along and puts the medium to new use, and makes it his or her own, yanks it out of this kind of amateur status, and makes it as profound and as moving and as formally interesting as any other medium. 

Ronald Reagan
[Actor and politician, b. 1911, Tampico, Illinois, d. 2004, Bel Air, California.]

 One picture is worth one-thousand denials. 

John Berger
[Writer and critic, b. 1926, London, lives in the Jura, France.]

 We hate to look at his [Donald McCullin’s] pictures, but we have to. McCullin is the eye we cannot shut. 

Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]

 I’ve got incredible power in my closet. Not power to do harm—just the feeling that I’ve captured people who have since died and people who will never look that way again. The camera is cruel, so I try to be as good as I can to make things even.