Bo > Bo's Quotes

“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.”
― Robert Frank

“There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.”
― Ansel Adams

“A photograph is usually looked at- seldom looked into.”
― Ansel Adams

“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”
― Susan Sontag

“Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell.”
― Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter

“You don't take a photograph, you make it.”
― Ansel Adams

“To the complaint, 'There are no people in these photographs,' I respond, There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.”
― Ansel Adams

“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”
― Ansel Adams

“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.”
― Ansel Adams

“While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.”
― Dorothea Lange

“Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.”
― Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography [Paperback]

“Always seeing something, never seeing nothing, being photographer”
― Walter De Mulder

“It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us.”
― Henri Cartier-Bresson, Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century

“What's really important is to simplify. The work of most photographers would be improved immensely if they could do one thing: get rid of the extraneous. If you strive for simplicity, you are more likely to reach the viewer. ”
― William Albert Allard

“No matter how much crap you gotta plow through to stay alive as a photographer, no matter how many bad assignments, bad days, bad clients, snotty subjects, obnoxious handlers, wigged-out art directors, technical disasters, failures of the mind, body, and will, all the shouldas, couldas, and wouldas that befuddle our brains and creep into our dreams, always remember to make room to shoot what you love. It’s the only way to keep your heart beating as a photographer.”
― Joe McNally, The Moment It Clicks: Photography Secrets from One of the World's Top Shooters

“A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.”
― Diane Arbus

“When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not (i)emerge(i), do not (i)leave(i): they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.”
― Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography [Paperback]

“People spot a big black lens, and they worry about what they're doing, or how their hair looks. Nobody see the person holding the camera.”
― Erica O'Rourke, Torn

“Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.”
― pleasefindthis

“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.”
― Henri Cartier-Bresson

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
― haruki murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“Pas a pas, se va luenh.
Step by step, we make our way.”
― Kate Mosse, Labyrinth

“Difficult times have helped me to understand better than before how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way, and that so many things that one goes worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.”
― Isak Dinesen

“All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story.”
― Isak Dinesen

“Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.”
― Isak Dinesen

“It is a sad hardship and slavery to people who live in towns, that in their movements they know of one dimension only; they walk along the line as if they were led on a string. The transition from the line to the plane into the two dimensions, when you wander across a field or through a wood, is a splendid liberation to the slaves, like the French Revolution. But in the air you are taken into the full freedom of the three dimensions; after long ages of exile and dreams the homesick heart throws itself into the arms of space.”
― Karen Blixen, Out of Africa

“Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

“If we all did the things we are really capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.”
― Thomas A. Edison

“In the sweet territory of silence we touch the mystery. It's the place of reflection and contemplation, and it's the place where we can connect with the deep knowing, to the deep wisdom way.”
― Angeles Arrien

“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it's not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That's why it's your path.”
― Joseph Campbell