Roy DeCarava
[Photographer, b. 1919, New York, d. 2009, Brooklyn, New York.]
My pictures are immediate and yet the same time, they’re forever. They present a moment so profoundly a moment that it becomes an eternity…. It’s like the pole vaulter who begins his run, shoots up, then comes down. At the peak there is no movement. He’s neither going up nor going down. That is the moment I wait for…
Régis Durand
[Critic, writer, and curator, lives in Paris.]
Many photographs (perhaps most) ask no more of us than that we bask in the serene contemplation of the represented object in its indisputable presence.
Vilém Flusser
[Writer and philosopher, b. 1920, Prague, Czechoslovakia, d. 1991, Prague.]
With every (informative) photograph, the photographic
program becomes poorer by one possibility
while the photographic universe becomes richer by one
realization.
Richard Avedon
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 2004, San Antonio, Texas.]
I don’t really remember the day when I stood behind my camera with Henry Kissinger on the other side. I am sure he doesn’t remember it either. But this photograph is here now to prove that no amount of kindness on my part could make this photograph mean exactly what he—or even I—wanted it to mean. It’s a reminder of the wonder and terror that is a photograph.
John Berger
[Writer and critic, b. 1926, London, d. 2017, Paris.]
...photography has no language of its own. One learns to read photographs as one learns to read footprints or cardiograms.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumed as such, publicly.
Eliot Porter
[Photographer, b. 1901, Winnetka, Illinois, d. 1990, Santa Fe, New Mexico.]
I do not photograph for ulterior purposes. I photograph for the thing itself—for the photograph—without consideration of how it may be used.
Wright Morris
[Writer and photographer, b. 1910, Central City, Nebraska, d. 1998, Mill Valley, California.]
What photographs usually do, more than anything else, is authenticate... existence. Authentication, not enlargement or interpretation is what we want.
