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

Bruce Mau
[Graphic designer and theorist,, b. 1959, Sudbury, Canada, lives in Toronto, Canada.]

 What is the focus of the new image infrastructure? Attention. It’s all designed for capturing, tracking, quantifying, manipulating, holding, buying, selling and controlling attention. 

Bruce Davidson
[Photographer, b. 1933, Oak Park, Illinois, lives in New York.]

 I burn intensely, but with a slow flame, like an acetylene torch. What keeps you going is the passion that you have. 

Edward Weston
[Photographer, b. 1886, Highland Park, Illinois, d. 1958, Wildcat Hill, California.]

 I shall let no chance pass to record interesting abstractions, but I feel definite in my belief that the approach to photography is through realism—and its most difficult approach. (1924) 

William Eggleston
[Photographer, b. 1939, Memphis, Tennessee, lives in Memphis.]

 The way I have always looked at it is the world is in color. And there’s nothing we can do about that. 

Mary Ellen Mark
[Photographer, b. 1940, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, d. 2015, New York.]

 It’s important for me to be honest. The men, women, and children I photograph are straightforward with me. I have to respect them for what they are… What I look for is compassion, not pity. 

André Bazin
[Film critic and theorist, b. 1918, Angers, France, d. 1958, Nogent-sur-Marne, Île-de-France, France.]

 A very faithful drawing may actually tell us more about the model but despite the promptings of our critical intelligence it will never have the irrational power of the photograph to bear away our faith. 

Jan Saudek
[Photographer, b. 1935, Prague, Czechoslovakia, lives in Prague.]

 What I really do is make portraits of the soul. 

Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]

 I arrived at writing [on photographs] from a frustration with the medium. I was frustrated by the silence of the still photograph.