Top 30 Imogen Cunningham Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.”

— Imogen Cunningham

2. “The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet.”

— Imogen Cunningham

3. “I don’t know what love means.”

— Imogen Cunningham

4. “None of us is born with the right face. It’s a tough job being a portrait photographer.”

— Imogen Cunningham

5. “I don’t resent anything.”

— Imogen Cunningham

6. “I don’t love the world. I think Jupiter should have hit us.”

— Imogen Cunningham

7. “I never stopped photographing. There were a couple of years when I didn’t have a darkroom, but that didn’t stop me from photographing.”

— Imogen Cunningham

8. “I never divide photographers into creative and uncreative, I just call them photographers. Who is creative? How do you know who is creative or not?”

— Imogen Cunningham

9. “When people ask me silly questions about my private life, I just say, I don’t discuss that.”

— Imogen Cunningham

10. “I don’t talk about success. I don’t know what it is. Wait until I’m dead.”

— Imogen Cunningham

11. “I was poor. When you’re poor you work, and when you’re rich you expect somebody to hand it to you. So I think being reasonably poor is very good for people.”

— Imogen Cunningham

12. “I don’t think there’s any such thing as teaching people photography, other than influencing them a little. People have to be their own learners. They have to have a certain talent.”

— Imogen Cunningham

13. “The thing that’s fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.”

— Imogen Cunningham

14. “I was brought up on art. My father thought I had a great hand at art and sent me to art school. But he did not want me to become a photographer.”

— Imogen Cunningham

15. “I photograph anything that light falls on.”

— Imogen Cunningham

16. “Some people say to me, Isn’t it too bad that people discovered you so late? I never thought that.”

— Imogen Cunningham

17. “My mind is vacant on names, but I know him as well as anything. When I need names they drop out of my head; when I don’t need them they drop back.”

— Imogen Cunningham

18. “I was invited to photograph Hollywood. They asked me what I would like to photograph. I said, Ugly men.”

— Imogen Cunningham

19. “I turn people into human beings by not making them into gods.”

— Imogen Cunningham

20. “I just believe in working. I’m not one of those romantic explainers of my own individual point of view.”

— Imogen Cunningham

21. “It’s silly to keep people alive who have a terrible disease.”

— Imogen Cunningham

22. “A woman said to me when she first sat down, You’re photographing the wrong side of my face. I said, Oh, is there one?”

— Imogen Cunningham

23. “Oh, you ask me, what is the greatest torture of a person who does portraits for a living? I could fill several volumes with nice nasty stories. I don’t know.”

— Imogen Cunningham

24. “I became kind of a drop-out in science after I came back to America. I wanted to photograph.”

— Imogen Cunningham

25. “When you do portraits professionally it’s not a desire, it’s for money.”

— Imogen Cunningham

26. “I told the students that whatever they did in class was for the wastebasket.”

— Imogen Cunningham

27. “Anybody is influenced by where and how he lives.”

— Imogen Cunningham

28. “Get it out of your historic head.”

— Imogen Cunningham

29. “There are certain things you don’t discuss with Ansel, especially if you don’t agree.”

— Imogen Cunningham

30. “I think San Francisco is the best place in the whole world for an easy life.”

— Imogen Cunningham

31. “I’d never kill myself for a man. I wouldn’t do it for anybody.”

— Imogen Cunningham

32. “When People magazine called me, I did the job on Ansel. I’m older than Ansel and he has to mind me.”

— Imogen Cunningham

33. “Suppose Cartier-Bresson asked the man who jumped the puddle to do it again – it never would have been the same. Start stealing!”

— Imogen Cunningham

34. “Everybody who does anything for the public can be criticized. There’s always someone who doesn’t like it.”

— Imogen Cunningham