Wolfgang Tillmans
[Photographer, b. 1968, Remscheid, Germany, lives in London.]

 I think it’s much more radical to see and show things as they look instead of making them somehow subversive through alienation or estrangement. 

James Agee
[Writer, b. 1909, Knoxville, Tennessee, d. 1955, New York.]

 Walker [Evans] setting up the terrible structure of the tripod crested by the black square heavy head, dangerous as that of a hunchback, of the camera; stooping beneath cloak and cloud of wicked cloth, and twisting buttons; a witchcraft preparing, colder than keenest ice, and incalculably cruel. (On Walker Evans photographing three tenant farmer families in Hale County, Alabama, 1936) 

Brassaï (Gyula Halász)
[Photographer, b. 1889, Brassó, Transylvania, Hungary (now Romania), d. 1984, Eze, Alpes-Maritimes, France.]

 There is always the danger of prostituting one’s gifts simply in order to live and to survive. The most difficult thing in life is to make money doing what you like to do. 

Cindy Sherman
[Artist, b. 1954, Glen Ridge, New Jersey, lives in New York.]

 The still must tease with the promise of a story the viewer of it itches to be told. 

Gilles Peress
[Photographer, b. 1946, Neuilly, France, lives in New York.]

 I am bad at memory—this is why I shoot pictures. 

Emmet Gowin
[Photographer, b. 1941, Danville, Virginia, lives in Princeton, New Jersey.]

 If you set out to make pictures about love, it can’t be done. But you can make pictures, and you can be in love. In that way, people sense the authenticity of what you do. 

Charis Wilson
[Model, b. 1914, San Francisco, d. 2009, Santa Cruz, California.]

 Usually when people got to know us a little, someone would look very seriously and say, “Would you mind telling me how— what it was that brought you two together?” And Edward [Weston] would give an anticipatory smirk and say, “Sex.” 

Italo Calvino
[Writer, b. 1923, Santiago de la Vegas, Cuba, d. 1985, Siena, Italy.]

 Perhaps true, total photography, he thought, is a pile of fragments of private images, against the creased background of massacres and coronations.