Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Photographs attract false beliefs the way flypaper attracts flies.
Sally Mann
[Photographer, b. 1951, Lexington, Virginia, lives in Lexington.]
The fact is that these are not my children; they are figures on silvery paper slivered out of time. They represent my children at a fraction of a second on one particular afternoon with infinite variables of light, expression, posture, muscle tension, mood, wind and shade. These are not my children at all; these are children in a photograph.
Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Photographs may be
taken—but we are also taken in
by them.
Sylvia Plachy
[Photographer, b. 1943, Budapest, Hungary, lives in New York.]
Every photo is almost a fiction or a dream. If it’s really good, it’s another form of life.
Robert Rauschenberg
[Artist, b. 1925, Port Arthur, Texas, d. 2008, Captiva Island, Florida.]
I like photographs of anything uninteresting. Maybe just two doors on a wall... The point is to be uninteresting.
Daido Moriyama
[Photographer, b. 1938, Ikeda-cho, Osaka, Japan, lives in Tokyo.]
For me photographs are taken in the eye before you’ve even thought what they mean. That’s the reality I’m interested in capturing.
Richard Misrach
[Photographer, b. 1949, Los Angeles, lives in San Francisco.]
I love the fact that a photograph is always open to interpretation—there is no fixed meaning.
Paul Theroux
[Writer, b. 1941, Medford, Massachusetts, lives in Cape Cod, Massachusetts and Haleiwa, Hawaii.]
“I’ve never seen Marilyn like that before,” a critic once said to me. “That’s not Marilyn,” I said. “It’s a picture.”
