Steve McCurry Quotes

My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.

A still photograph is something which you can always go back to. You can put it on your wall and look at it again and again. Because it is that frozen moment. I think it tends to burn into your psyche. It becomes ingrained in your mind. A powerful picture becomes iconic of a place or a time or a situation.

A picture can express a universal humanism, or simply reveal a delicate and poignant truth by exposing a slice of life that might otherwise pass unnoticed.

The photograph is an undeniably powerful medium. Free from the constraints of language, and harnessing the unique qualities of a single moment frozen in time.

We photographers say that we take a picture, and in a certain sense, that is true. We take something from people's lives, but in doing so we tell their story.

I think life is too short not to be doing something which you really believe in. Whether you're photographing for yourself, for your job, whether you photograph on the weekends or everyday or once in a while, the main point is having fun and to be exercising your curiosity and to be really in love with what you are doing.

Unconsciously, I think I watch for a look, an expression, features or nostalgia that can summarize or more accurately reveal life.

I strive for individual pictures that will burn in people's memories.

For those who were desperate, my camera became an object of hope (...)Throughout my year-long coverage of the monsoon world, my strongest conviction was that I was involved in the fundamentals of life.

I think life is too short not to be doing something which you really believe in.

Most of my photos are grounded in people, I look for the unguarded moment, the essential soul peeking out, experience etched on a persons face.

It’s important for you to spend your time photographing things that matter to you. You need to understand the things that have meaning to you, and not what others think is important for you.

In our contemporary society, one so over-inundated with imagery, it is easy to overlook the power of a single frame to change the way we look at the world, or rally disparate hearts to a single cause. Yet, ours is a society shaped by this very phenomenon.

In India in particular, where millions have no home but the streets, virtually every life event is carried out in public: prayer, eating, sleeping, nursing, crude dentistry, even bodily functions. In the secular West, where nothing is sacred, everything seems hidden; yet in Asia, where nothing is hidden, everything is sacred.

If you want to be a photographer, you have to photograph.

What matters most is that each picture stands on its own with its own place and feeling.

If you wait, people will forget your camera, and the soul will drift up into view.

The definition of a great picture is one that stays with you, one that you can't forget. It doesn't have to be technically good at all.

Some of the great pictures happen along the journey and not necessarily at your destination.

If you want to be a photographer, first leave home

To become a photographer leave your house first.

What is important to my work is the individual picture. I photograph stories on assignment, and of course they have to be put together coherently. But what matters most is that each picture stands on its own, with its own place and feeling.