Lee Friedlander
[Photographer, b. 1934, Aberdeen, Washington, lives in New York.]
I’m not a premeditative photographer. I see a picture and I make it. If I had a chance, I’d be out shooting all the time. You don’t have to go looking for pictures. The material is generous. You go out and the pictures are staring at you.
Peter Henry Emerson
[Writer and photographer, b. 1856, LaPalma, Cuba, d. 1936, Falmouth, Cornwall, England.]
It is not the apparatus that chooses the picture, but the
man who wields it.
Edmundo Desnoes
[Writer, b. 1930, Havana, Cuba, lives in New York.]
Photographs are detonators. They explode in us. We are the gaze as well as the gazed-at. The observer and the observed.
Thomas Ruff
[Photographer, b. 1958, Zell, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf, Germany.]
I think that historically photographs may have been made in a naive and honest way, when photographers believed in the “pencil of nature” and recording what was in front of the camera. But photography quickly came to be used in a prejudicial way, losing its innocence and consequently its ability to communicate.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
The familiarity of certain photographs builds our sense of the present and immediate past. Photographs lay down routes of reference, and serve as totems of causes: sentiment is more like to crystallize around a photograph than around a verbal slogan.
Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Quite often photographs gain power from what is omitted from the frame rather than from what is included.
Ernst Haas
[Photographer, b. 1921, Vienna, Austria, d. 1986, New York City.]
The best pictures differentiate themselves by nuances... a tiny relationship—either a harmony or a disharmony—that creates a picture.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
