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The important thing is not the camera but the eye.
Sep 29, 2025
The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.
The camera's only job is to get out of the way of making photographs.
The camera makes you forget you're there. It's not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much.
A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.
The camera can photograph thought.
Leica, schmeica. The camera doesn't make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But you have to see.
Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.
For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.
If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug around a camera.
If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough.
The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.
The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don't belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation.
The world just does not fit conveniently into the format of a 35mm camera.
Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face.
The camera can photograph thought. It's better than a paragraph of sweet polemic.
No photographer is as good as the simplest camera.
Often while traveling with a camera we arrive just as the sun slips over the horizon of a moment, too late to expose film, only time enough to expose our hearts.
I began to realize that the camera sees the world differently than the human eye and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed.
As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs.
No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.
A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they'll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won't do a thing for you if you don't have anything in your head or in your heart.
Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.
My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.
It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera... they are made with the eye, heart and head.
No matter how advanced your camera you still need to be responsible for getting it to the right place at the right time and pointing it in the right direction to get the photo you want.
Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man.
Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.
The camera has always been a guide, and it's allowed me to see things and focus on things that maybe an average person wouldn't even notice.
I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.
A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.
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.
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.
Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.
One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind.
There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.
You don't make a photograph just with a camera
The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.
Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.
The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.
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.
The camera adds a certain sheen to things. Something about being frozen in time really makes things sparkle.
There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.
There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.
You don't take a photograph, you make it.
The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it!
All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.
The camera cannot lie, but it can be an accessory to untruth.