Nathan Lyons
[Photographer, writer, and curator, b. 1930, Jamaica, New York, d. 2016, Rochester, New York.]

 Photography has achieved an unprecedented mirroring of the things in our culture. We have pictured so many aspects and objects of our environment in the form of photographs (motion pictures and television) that the composite of these representations has assumed the proportions and identity of an actual environment. 
 The accidents of millions of amateurs devoid of a picture vocabulary—which produced an outpouring of multiple exposures, distortions, unusual perspectives, foreshortening of planes, imbalance—has contributed greatly to the visual vocabulary of all media since before the turn of the century. 
 The eye and the camera see more than the mind knows, is it not also conceivable that the mind knows more than the eye and the camera can see? 
 The snapshot, not as product but as process. Unpretentious and yet important, aspiring to nothing but a notation in passing. Things as they are, or what we make of them?... Not one or the other, but all of them together, of many places and spaces—a continuity of impressions. 
 I’ll project a future for photography and the photographer... in fifteen years an audience will exist that will be able to understand that a photographer can bring forward a piece of literature, and that the photographer will be functioning as author. (1966, in conversation with Garry Winogrand and Simpson Kalisher.)