Mary Ellen Mark
[Photographer, b. 1940, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, d. 2015, New York.]
It’s important for me to be honest. The men, women, and children I photograph are straightforward with me. I have to respect them for what they are… What I look for is compassion, not pity.
Nikki S. Lee
[Photographer, b. 1970, Kye-Chang, Korea, lives in New York.]
Just because I use the photographic medium, that doesn’t mean I’m a photographer.
Nan Goldin
[Photographer, b. 1953, Washington, D.C., lives in New York and Paris.]
… I wrote myself in as the lover. Sometimes, the obsession lasted for years. It was photography as the sublimation of sex, a means of seduction, and a way to remain a crucial part of my subjects’ lives. A chance to touch someone with a camera rather than physically.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
The world becomes a series of events that you transform into pictures, and those events have reality, so far as you have pictures of them.
Susie Linfield
[Writer and critic, New York, lives in New York.]
The ability of photographs to conjure deep emotion is one of their great strengths. But this power—precisely because it is divorced from narrative, political context, and analysis—is equally a danger. Ironically, the more searing an image… the more misleading it can be.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Only that which narrates can make us understand.
Paul Cezanne
[Artist, b. 1839, Aix-en-Provence, France, d. 1906, Aix, France.]
Everything is about to disappear. You’ve got to hurry up if you still want to see things.
Richard Prince
[Artist, b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone, lives in New York.]
We do not make art. We have unnamable motors and dangerous impulses that occupy our thoughts.
