Street Photography Quotes

Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.

Street Photography is like fishing. Catching the fish is more exciting than eating it.

It’s neither our culture nor our race which
interconnects us. It’s Street Photography.

I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.

When you photograph people in color you photograph their clothes. When you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their soul!

Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.

To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.

I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photography—that it is purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in the with the history of painting and other art forms.

If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.

The eye should learn to listen before it looks.

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

I love the people I photograph. I mean, they’re my friends. I’ve never met most of them or I don’t know them at all, yet through my images I live with them.

If you can smell the street by looking at the photo, it’s a street photograph

Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn’t look like somebody else’s work.

You don’t make a photograph just with a camera

Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.

You don’t take a photograph, you make it.

Street photography is art and if art is a crime, please God, forgive me.

I have always felt that a lot of the most interesting work, not just mine but other people’s, falls into [the] nether area, somewhere between the worlds of documentary and photojournalism (two very vague words) and the world of art. I think a lot of street photography falls into this nether area.

Photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the photo as a judgment that the photograph is good

There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.

During the work, you have to be sure that you haven’t left any holes, that you’ve captured everything, because afterwards it will be too late.

Never boss people around. It’s more important to click with people than to click the shutter.

The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.

The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv.

If I saw something in my viewfinder that looked familiar to me, I would do something to shake it up.

Seeing is not enough; you have to feel what you photograph

Since I’m inarticulate, I express myself with images.

A good photograph is knowing where to stand.

Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.

Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.

Nothing happens when you sit at home. I always make it a point to carry a camera with me at all times…I just shoot at what interests me at that moment.

I suspect it is for one’s self-interest that one looks at one’s surroundings and one’s self. This search is personally born and is indeed my reason and motive for making photographs.

You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.

Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.

There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.

It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.

Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever… it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.

All the technique in the world doesn’t compensate for the inability to notice.

I have problems with a lot of photography, particularly street photography and photojournalism – objectifying the other, finding the contempt and exoticism that you might feel within yourself or toward yourself and projecting it out to others. There can be an abusive power to photography, too.

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.

When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.