David Bailey
[Photographer, b. 1938, London, lives in London.]

 If you try to get famous you won’t, but if you don’t care you probably will. You've got to stick to your guns, too, because once you back down you’re finished. 

Nicholas Nixon
[Photographer, b. 1947, Detroit, Michigan, lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.]

 I’m not very good at working for other people. I mostly make pictures because of some whim. With luck, I get a glimpse of something, and then it turns into an adventure, and then into a project. 

Abelardo Morell
[b. 1948, Havana, Cuba, lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.]

 The appetite for visual stuff is somewhat perverse now because it assumes that there is no intellectual appetite at the same time. It’s this weird “swallow it fast” and pay now. 

Josef Koudelka
[Photographer, b. 1938, Biskovice, Moravia, Czechoslovakia, lives in Paris.]

 Personally, I have had the good fortune of always being able to do what I wanted, never working for others. Maybe it is a silly principle, but the idea that no one can buy me is important for me. I refuse assignments, even for projects that I have decided to do anyhow. It is somewhat the same with my books. When my first book, the one on the gypsies, was published, it was hard for me to accept the idea that I could no longer choose the people to whom I would show my photos, that any one could buy them. 

Garry Winogrand
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, d. 1984, Tijuana, Mexico.]

 I’m sure some of [the current rise of interest in photography] has to do with taxes, tax shelter things... I don’t know, but I think it’s got to do with economics. Now and then you get somebody who buys a picture because he likes it... I don’t really have any faith in anybody enjoying photographs in a large enough sense to matter. I think it’s all about finances, on one side. And then there are people who are socially ambitious. 

Peter Wollen
[Writer, theorist, filmmaker, b. 1938, London, lives in Los Angeles.]

 For photography to be an art involves reformulating notions of art, rejecting both material and formal purism and also the separation of art from commerce as distinct semiotic practices that never interlock. 

Cindy Sherman
[Artist, b. 1954, Glen Ridge, New Jersey, lives in New York.]

 I didn’t set out to establish an alternative. No one really did—expectations were a lot lower than you see with people coming out of art schools today. I did want to do something different; I was bored by what was going on in art and particularly in painting, but I didn’t think I was actually going to make a difference. We all would have been happy just to have a show somewhere. 
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