Last Updated on February 4, 2021 by Scott M. Thomas
This is an amazing collection of quotes writing about still life photography.
Still life photography is one kind of photography that is used for taking small objects. Below we gathered some of the best quotes of still life photography that will help every photographer.
“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.” – Bruce Gilden
“Still life is boring. Never stand still! Jumping bean life!” – Catherynne M. Valente
“If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff.” – Jim Richardson
“Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.” – Ambrose Bierce
“The camera makes you forget you’re there. It’s not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much.” – Annie Leibovitz
“If you see something that moves you, and then snap it, you keep a moment.” – Linda McCartney
“What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.” – Karl Lagerfeld
“A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is thereby a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.” – Ansel Adams
“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.” – Susan Sontag
“What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.” – Roland Barthes
“I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost.” – Nan Goldin
“Essentially what photography is is life lit up.” – Sam Abell
“I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.” – Diane Arbus
“Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.” – Marc Riboud
“Once you learn to care, you can record images with your mind or on film. There is no difference between the two.” – Unknown
“A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you.” – Brigitte Bardot
“Life is still life. It’s still tough, complicated, and more than a little messy, with lessons to be learned, mistakes to be made, triumphs and disappointments to be had, and not every day is meant to be a party.” – Alyson Noel
“My still-life painting has more to do with light and shadow than with the objects themselves.” – William C. Wright
“Still ending, and beginning still.” – William Cowper
“If the photographer is interested in the people in front of his lens, and if he is compassionate, it’s already a lot. The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.” – Eve Arnold
“A tear contains an ocean. A photographer is aware of the tiny moments in a person’s life that reveal greater truths.” – Unknown
“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” – Dorothea Lange
“There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.” – Ansel Adams
“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” – Diane Arbus
“The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.” – Elliott Erwitt
“One doesn’t stop seeing. One doesn’t stop framing. It doesn’t turn off and turn on. It’s on all the time.” – Annie Leibovitz
“Memories are like a still life painted by ten different student artists: some will be blue-based; others red; some will be as stark as Picasso and others as rich as Rembrandt; some will be foreshortened and others distant. Recollections are in the eye of the beholder; no two held up side by side will ever quite match.” – Jodi Picoult
“What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape, but the human figure.” – Henri Matisse
“Life is still life, whatever its pangs; our eyes and ears and their use remain with us, though the prospect of what pleases be wholly withdrawn, and the sound of what consoles must be silenced.” – Charlotte Bronte
“Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day.” – Virginia Woolf
“Landscape, that vast still life, invites description, not narration. It is lyric. It has no story: it is the beloved, and asks only to be contemplated.” – Patricia Hampl
“I have found in my still-life work that I seem to be able to tell what objects are important to me by what tends to stay in the painting as it develops.” – Richard Diebenkorn
“There are two kinds of people in this world, and I am one of them.” – Dave Barry
“What greatly attracted me – and it was the main line of advance of Cubism – was how to give material expression to this new space of which I had an inkling. So I began to paint chiefly still lifes, because in nature there is a tactile, I would almost say a manual space… that was the earliest Cubist painting – the quest for space.” – Georges Braque
“Years ago – in the 70s, for about a decade – I carried a camera every place I went. And I shot a lot of pictures that were still life and landscape, using available light.” – Leonard Nimoy
“To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!” – Ted Grant
“A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.” – Diane Arbus
“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” – Susan Sontag
“The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it!” – Ansel Adams
“For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.” – Diane Arbus
“Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.” – Joe McNally
“Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.” – David Alan Harvey
Recommended reading – 44 Best Night Photography Quotes And Sayings
Sayings About Still Life Photography
“Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.” – Dorothea Lange
“The successful painter is continually painting still life.” – Charles Webster Hawthorne
“I love painting still lifes because there’s a feeling of musical, flowing experience. The drawing doesn’t matter as much – what you’re really after is a feeling of clarity and beauty.” – Jacob Collins
“For me, the camera is a sketchbook, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
“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
“I am essentially a painter of the kind of still life composition that communicates a sense of tranquillity and privacy, moods which I have always valued above all else.” – Giorgio Morandi
“In my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.” – Mark Twain
“What difference does it make whether you’re looking at a photograph or looking at a still life in front of you? You still have to look.” – Chuck Close
“When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I’d like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.” – Annie Leibovitz
“My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.” – Steve McCurry
“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.” – Elliott Erwitt
“The picture that you took with your camera is the imagination you want to create with reality.” – Scott Lorenzo
“No, you don’t shoot things. You capture them. Photography means painting with light. And that’s what you do. You paint a picture only by adding light to the things you see.” – Katja Michael
