Joel Meyerowitz
[Photographer, b. 1938, New York, lives in New York.]
I think about photographs as being full, or empty. You picture something in a frame and it’s got lots of accounting going on in it—stones and buildings and trees and air—but that’s not what fills up a frame. You fill up the frame with feelings, energy, discovery, and risk, and leave room enough for someone else to get in there.
William Burroughs
[Writer, b. 1914, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1997, Lawrence, Kansas.]
There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.
Aaron Siskind
[Photographer, b. 1903, New York, d. 1991, Providence, Rhode Island.]
My idea of what a picture is: it’s there, it exists by itself, it’s clean, it’s economically stated, it’s pure, it has meaning.
Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
Photographs no longer provoke a meditation upon external phenomena, but on the conditions of their own existence.
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.
Robert Morris
[Artist and theorist, b. 1931, Kansas City, Missouri, lives in New York.]
There is probably no defense against the malevolent powers of the photograph to convert every visible aspect of the world into a static, consumable image.
Christian Boltanski
[Artist, b. 1944, Paris, lives in Paris.]
The photo replaces the memory. When someone dies, after a while you can’t visualize them anymore, you only remember them through their pictures.
Robert Rauschenberg
[Artist, b. 1925, Port Arthur, Texas, d. 2008, Captiva Island, Florida.]
I don’t want a picture to look like something it isn’t. I want it to look like something it is.
