by Christopher Osborne

World Photography Day pays homage to the date the French government released the daguerreotype patent making that photographic process “free to the world”.

Today, it has evolved into an opportunity to encourage and promote photography across the world. Some see it as a chance to compete in a race to create a single compelling image. Organisations use it as a date to announce winners of competitions, and in a pre- covid world others saw it as an opportunity to meet and encourage.

And retailers and manufacturers are also keen to promote photography, so expect a clutch of offers that you can’t refuse and possibly even some product announcements.

Of course, photography means different things to different people. But perhaps the most important thing for those of us who are active photographers to do on world photography day is to reflect for a moment. Here are a selection of quotes which we hope help:

“With photography, I like to create a fiction out of reality”. Martin Parr

“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

“If you want to be famous, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world”. Miroslav Tichy

“I hope to stay unemployed as a war photographer till the end of my life”. Robert Capa

“I was a friend and I got new kinds of pictures. I was always treading a line between photographer and friend”. Olivia Arthur

“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know”. Dianne Arbus

“I believe that photographs actually rob all of us of our memory”. Sally Mann

“Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling”. Don McCullin

“Good photos are few and far between”. Joseph Koudelka