Larry Fink
[Photographer, b. 1941, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania.]
I’ve made a lot of fucking good pictures since I started.
(Declining a request to select a few photographs that “epitomize his work.”) 
Jeff Koons
[Artist, b. 1955, York, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
The entertainment industry, the advertising industry have taken [the] tools from the art world and made themselves much more politically potent. We are really devastated and very impotent right now. A photographer just working for an advertising company has a platform to be much more politically effective in the world than an artist.
Lady Elizabeth Eastlake (Elizabeth Rigby)
[Writer and photographer, b. 1809, London, d. 1893, London.]
Where ten self-styled artists eked out a precarious living by painting inferior miniatures, ten times that number now earn their bread by supplying photographic portraits.
(1857)
Mark Getty
[Oil fortune heir, photo stock entrepreneur, b. 1960, Rome, lives in Buckinghamshire, Tuscany, and London.]
Intellectual property is the oil of the twenty-first century.
Wright Morris
[Writer and photographer, b. 1910, Central City, Nebraska, d. 1998, Mill Valley, California.]
What does it profit the photograph to be accepted as a work of art? Does this dubious elevation in market value enhance or diminish what is intrinsically photographic? There is little that is new in this practice but much that is alien to photography. The photographer, not the photograph, becomes the collectible.
John Szarkowski
[Curator, critic, historian, and photographer, b. 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, d. 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]
The basic effect of modern mass media on photography has been to erode the creative independence and the accountability of the photographer who has worked for them.
(1967)
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.
David Wojnarowicz
[Artist and activist, b. 1954, Redbank, New Jersey, d. 1990, New York.]
No one can really explain in a rational way what makes a good photograph or a bad photograph... This is why the art world will not throw billions of dollars at photography the way it has at painting; and that is what makes it an exciting medium.
