You can’t know what will come – the achievements don’t exist before the work is made – so the process is all you have. There’s never a point, as long as you’re still breathing, when that’s not how it is.

Dawoud Bey

And if a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it’s as though I’ve neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up.

Richard Avedon

Sean was born in this traditional Irish farmhouse in a village in County Longford in 1921, where he remained into his twenties. He was an uncle many times over - one of his sisters bore eighteen children (sixteen survived) and another sister four. Work was hard to come by in Ireland and he left his large extended family in the late 1940s to find work in England.

By 1950 Sean had married and went on to have four children – two boys, two girls. The family lived in North London and for over thirty years he worked for British Rail. One of his many roles was the massively strenuous manual coupling of train carriages, something difficult to imagine now.

Nearly every year in the summer, on his own, he would visit his old family home and stay there for a few weeks, He’d cut the grass and fix what needed fixing, sit in the sun by day or by the fire in the evening and enjoy his period of simple solitude. As he grew older, Sean’s visits were a bit less frequent and the very last time he went there was in 2009, just a year before he died, aged 89.

It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty, the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.

David Attenborough

To the same degree as man has raised himself above the state of nature, animals have fallen below it: conquered and turned into slaves, or treated as rebels and scattered by force, their societies have faded away, their industry has become unproductive, their tentative arts have disappeared; each species has lost its general qualities, all of them retaining only their distinct capacities, developed in some by example, imitation, education, and in others, by fear and necessity during the constant watch for survival. What visions and plans can these soulless slaves have, these relics of the past without power?

Georges-Louis Leclerc (Comte do Buffon)

Photography helps people to see.

Berenice Abbott

Climb up on some hill at sunrise. Everybody needs perspective once in a while, and you’ll find it there.

Robb Sagendorph

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

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

Dorothea Lange

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

That frame of mind that you need to make fine pictures of a very wonderful subject, you cannot do it by not being lost yourself.

Dorothea Lange

I’m looking for the way in which interior thoughts make themselves visible on the surface of a face at any given moment.

Dawoud Bey

The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

When we do not know why the photographer has taken a picture and when we do not know why we are looking at it, all of a sudden we discover something that we start seeing. I like this confusion.

Saul Leiter

Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.

Diane Arbus

I think of [my photographs] as found paintings because I don’t crop them, I don’t manipulate them or anything. So they’re like found objects to me.

Dennis Hopper

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of [one] with imagination, nature is imagination itself.

William Blake

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

Susan Sontag

The pictures are there, and you just take them.

Robert Capa

A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.

Steve Martin

It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.

John Steinbeck

Look at light and admire its beauty. Close your eyes, and then look again: what you saw is no longer there; and what you will see later is not yet.

Leonardo da Vinci

Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography.

George Eastman