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
William J. T. Mitchell
[Writer, theorist, and architect, b. 1944, Melbourne, Australia, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
We are surrounded by pictures; we have an abundance of theories about them, but it doesn’t seem to do us any good. Knowing what pictures are doing, understanding them, doesn’t seem necessarily to give us power over them. 
Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
People often trust low-res images because they look more real. But of course they are not more real, just easier to fake… You never see a 10-megapixel photograph of Big Foot or the Abominable Snowman or the Loch Ness Monster. Cindy Sherman
[Artist, b. 1954, Glen Ridge, New Jersey, lives in New York.]
In horror stories or in fairy tales, the fascination with the morbid is also, at least for me, a way to prepare for the unthinkable... That’s why it’s very important for me to show the artificiality of it all, because the real horrors of the world are unmatchable, and they’re too profound. Robert Mapplethorpe
[Photographer, b. 1946, Floral Park, Long Island, d. 1989, Boston, Massachusetts.]
Perfection means you don’t question anything about the photograph. Nikki S. Lee
[Photographer, b. 1970, Kye-Chang, Korea, lives in New York.]
I don’t want to carry big things around with me. I’m lazy. The snapshot camera, you just carry it around and take the picture. You don’t need to think about anything. People in the street are not going to wait for you with a big camera. They would freak out. With a snapshot camera, they are comfortable. Harry Callahan
[Photographer, b. 1912, Detroit, Michigan, d. 1999, Atlanta, Georgia.]
To be a photographer, one must photograph. No amount of book learning, no checklist of seminars attended, can substitute for the simple act of making pictures. Experience is the best teacher of all. And for that, there is no guarantee that one will become an artist. Only the journey matters. Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead. Nhem En
[Photographer, b. 1961, Kampong Leng, Kampong Chhnang, Cambodia, lives in Cambodia.]
My only job was to photograph them, and it was someone else who tortured and killed these people. As a photographer, I had no right to beat, torture, or kill prisoners. I could not touch them.
(En, official photographer at Khmer Rouge torture center Tuol Sleng, estimates he took photographs of 10,000 people arriving at the center. Eight survived.)