From the Boing Boing forum on Flickr come these photography quotations picked by forum readers:
"Photography…it’s the easiest medium in which to be competent. Anybody with a point-and-shoot camera can take a competent picture. But it’s the hardest medium in which to have, to express, some kind of personal vision. Because there is no touch, there is no hand, there is no physicality. The fact that you CAN have something that’s recognizable from 50 feet across the gallery as a Diane Arbus or an Irving Penn…the fact that you can have recognizable authorship means they really have done something." ~ Chuck Close
"…to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude." – Susan Sontag
"The best camera is the one that’s with you" – Chase Jarvis
"Shoot for the secrets, develop for the surprises" – Diane Arbus
"I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don’t like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself." Diane Arbus
"If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough." – Robert Capa
"He will take his camera and ride off in search of new evidence that his city, even in her most drunken and disorderly and pathetic moments, is beautiful." – William McCleery
"No place is boring, if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film." – Robert Adams
“You don’t take a photograph, you make it." – Ansel Adams
“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst." – Henri Cartier-Bresson
"Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph." – Matt Hardy
“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." – Elliott Erwitt
“Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow." – Imogen Cunningham
"You’ve got to push yourself harder. You’ve got to start looking for pictures nobody else could take. You’ve got to take the tools you have and probe deeper." – William Albert Allard
"If I saw something in my viewfinder that looked familiar to me, I would do something to shake it up." – Garry Winogrand
“I always thought good photos were like good jokes. If you have to explain it, it just isn’t that good." – Anonymous
"Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop." – Ansel Adams
“It can be a trap of the photographer to think that his or her best pictures were the ones that were hardest to get." – Timothy Allen
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