Victor Burgin
[Artist and writer, b. 1941, Sheffield, England, lives in London.]
It is almost as unusual to pass a day without seeing a photograph as it is to miss seeing writing.
Anonymous
[lived or lives somewhere.]
One photo out of focus is a mistake. Ten photos out of focus are an experimentation. One hundred photos out of focus are a style.
Jerry Uelsmann
[Photographer, b. 1934, Detroit, Michigan, lives in Gainesville, Florida.]
Although I believe my work is basically optimistic, I would like people to view my photographs with an open mind. I am not looking for a specific reaction, but if my images move people or excite them I am satisfied.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
The photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes surprising when we do not know why it has been taken.
David LaChapelle
[Photographer, b. 1968, Connecticut, lives in New York.]
Pictures are an escape. They should be bigger than life. In the same way, celebrities provide an escape from the mundane. They are photographed so we can worship them—so they are worthy of our worship.
Jock Sturges
[Photographer, b. 1947, New York, lives in San Francisco.]
Every photograph is a record of the relationship that existed between the photographer and the person photographed. If that relationship is superficial and fleeting, let's say, for example, a fashion photograph, where the relationship consists mostly of money and surface, then the pictures are somehow not very nourishing. In fact, most fashion photographs ever made are now fish wrap, at best. They haven’t endured, they don’t endure in our minds, because there’s little or no relationship depicted. But the great photographs in photography, the ones that we really love, are so often the ones where the relationships depicted are the deepest.
Marcel Proust
[Writer, b. 1871, Auteuil, Paris, d. 1922, Paris.]
She would have liked me to have in my room photographs of ancient buildings or of beautiful places. But at the moment of buying them, and for all that the subject of the picture had an aesthetic value, she would find that vulgarity and utility had too prominent a part in them, through the mechanical nature of their reproduction through photography.
Robert Heinecken
[Photographer, b. 1931, Denver, d. 2006, Albuquerque, New Mexico.]
I was never in a school situation where someone said, “This is the way a photograph is supposed to look.” I was completely open to cut them up, or do anything like that. I think if I had been in touch with people earlier, then I wouldn’t have felt comfortable doing that. It would have been too bizarre.
