Marius de Zayas
[Artist, b. 1880, Veracruz, Mexico, d. 1961, Greenwich, Connecticut.]

 When man uses the camera without any final preconceived idea of final results, when he uses the camera as a means to penetrate the objective reality of facts, to acquire truth, when he tries to represent by itself and not by adapting it to any system of emotional representation, then, man is doing Photography. (1913) 
 Photography is beginning to be photography, for until now it has only been art. (1923) 
 Photography is not an Art. It is not even an art. Photography is the plastic verification of a fact... Art presents to us what we may call the emotions or intellectual truth; photography the material truth. (1913) 
 The photographer—the true photographer—is he who has become able, through a state of perfect consciousness, to possess such a clear view of things as to enable him to understand and feel the beauty of the reality of Form. (1913) 
 [The idea photographer] tried to get at that objectivity of Form which generates the different conceptions that man has of Form... [The idea photographer] puts himself in front of nature, and without preconceptions, with the free mind of an investigator, with the method of an experimentalist, tries to get out of her a true state of conditions. (1913)