Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
The Photograph does not call up the past (nothing Proustian in a photograph). The effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see has indeed existed.
John Loengard
[Photographer, editor, and critic, b. 1934, New York, lives in New York.]
There are two kinds of photographs: mine and other people’s. I never think of what I might do myself when I look at someone else’s pictures... there is no subject in the world I have ever wanted to photograph. It’s the picture, not the object, that is important to me.
Penelope Umbrico
[Photographer, b. 1957, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
In the act of making, sharing, and consuming images, it seems like the more one shares images of oneself, the less one exists in the world.
Sarah Moon (Marielle Hadengue)
[Model and photographer, b. 1941, Paris, France, lives in Paris.]
The photos that interest me most, I can’t say why I took them. I think my gift is that I still work with a certain amount of unconsciousness.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
Sometimes the pictures disappear and there’s nothing you can do. You can’t tell the person, “Oh, please smile again. Do that gesture again.” Life is once, forever.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
...there is always a defeat of Time in [historical photographs]:
that is dead and
that is going to die. These two little girls looking at a primitive airplane above their village (they are dressed like my mother as a child, they are playing with hoops)—how alive they are! They have their whole lives before them; but also they are dead (today), they are then
already dead (yesterday).
Geoffrey Batchen
[Photohistorian, b. 1956, Australia, lives in Wellington, New Zealand.]
All of us tend to look at photographs as if we are simply gazing through a two-dimensional window onto some outside world. This is almost a perceptual necessity; in order to see what the photograph is of, we must first repress our consciousness of what the photograph is.
Joel-Peter Witkin
[Photographer, b. 1939, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.]
Sometimes I say to myself that the work is smarter than I am.
