Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
[Photography as] a career?! It’s for a prime minister or an entrepreneur or a funeral director.
That’s a career.
Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]
Part of the difficulty in trying to be both an artist and a businessperson is this: You make a picture because you have seen something beyond price; then you are to turn and assign to your record of it a cash value. If the selling is not necessarily a contradiction of the truth in the picture, it is so close to being a contradiction—and the truth is always in shades of gray—that you are worn down by the threat.
Albert Sands Southworth
[Photographer, b. 1811, West Fairlee, Vermont, d. 1894, Charlestown, Massachusetts.]
Into the practice of no other business or art was there ever such an absurd, blind, and pell-mell rush. From the accustomed labours of agriculture and machine shop, from the factory and counter, from the restaurant, coachbox, and forecastle, representatives have appeared to perform the work for which a life apprenticeship could hardly be sufficient for preparation...
Andrew Savulich
[Photographer, b. 1949, Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
The best way to make money with a camera is to sell it.
Paul Strand
[Photographer, b. 1890, New York, d. 1976, Oregeval, France.]
If Ansel Adams gets a thousand dollars a print, I want ten thousand.
John Berger
[Writer and critic, b. 1926, London, d. 2017, Paris.]
Walk down a street of private galleries—but it is unnecessary to describe the dealers with their faces like silk purses. Everything they say is said to disguise their proper purpose. If you could fuck works of art as well as buy them, they would be pimps.
Bill Owens
[Photographer, b. 1938, San Jose, California, lives in Hayward, California.]
I wouldn’t have ended up divorced if I had that security of a regular job. We were always hanging onto the edge. The next grant, the next book contract was always going to be the one to make it. It never did. Finally your dreams all crash, the dreams of communicating through journalism, through documentary photography.
(1984)
Donna Ferrato
[Photographer, b. 1949, Waltham, Massachusetts, lives in New York.]
It’s very tough for documentary photographers these days. We’re the dinosaurs... Today, if you want to be a documentary photographer, you have to be prepared to put in your own money, your own time, and also be doing this for yourself. It’s a famine time for photographers out there.
(2002)
