Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Photographs do not explain; they acknowledge.
Lev Manovich
[Artist, theorist, and critic, b. 1960, Moscow, lives in New York.]
Once we came to accept the photographic image as reality, the way to its future simulation was open.
Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Photographs attract false beliefs the way flypaper attracts flies.
Daido Moriyama
[Photographer, b. 1938, Ikeda-cho, Osaka, Japan, lives in Tokyo.]
Photographs are pieces of the everlasting world—daily life—and fossils of light and time. They are also fragments of presentiment, inspiration, record, and memory about human beings and their history, as well as another language and world that becomes visible and intelligible through objectifying reality by means of cameras. They show us beauty and tenderness and also ugliness and cruelty now and then, not as the answer but always as a new question. I believe photographs to be pieces of an incomplete jigsaw puzzle. Which is why I have been and will be devoted to photography.
Robert Doisneau
[Photographer, b. 1912, Gentilly, Val-de-Marne, France, d. 1994, Montrouge, France.]
The best photos, the ones that are remembered, are the ones that have first passed through the person’s mind before being restored by the camera.
Pieter Hugo
[Photographer, b. 1976, Johannesburg, South Africa, lives in Cape Town.]
[Photography’s] true seduction lies in its foot in reality. It still has the pretense of being a quasi-document.
Lawrence Alloway
[Writer, curator, and critic, b. 1927, London, d. 1990, New York.]
If “a print is the widow of the stone,” to quote Robert Rauschenberg, then a photograph is the twin of an event.
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.
