Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
...the danger is that photography might become very precious — “Oh, a very rare print.” There’s not a very real place for it. But what does it mean? That preciousness is a sickness. Why do photographers start giving numbers to their prints? It’s absurd. What do you do when the 20th print has been done? Do you swallow the negative? Do you shoot yourself? It’s the gimmick of money.
Wim Wenders
[Artist and filmmaker, b. 1945, Düsseldorf, lives in Berlin.]
An image that is unseen can’t sell anything. It is pure, therefore true, beautiful, in one word: innocent. As long as no eye contaminates it, it is in perfect unison with the world. If it is not seen, the image and the object it represents belong together.
Marshall McLuhan
[Writer and theorist, b. 1911, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, d. 1980, Toronto, Canada.]
Photography turns people into things and their image into a mass consumer product.
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.
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.
Philip Jones Griffiths
[Photojournalist, b. 1936, Rhuddian, Wales, d. 2008, London.]
When Bill Gates started Corbis we were told that he needed images to fill those “digital picture frames” in his home, and many found this plausible. But now it’s pretty clear that he’s set out to control the visual history of the twentieth century.
Athol Fugard
[Playright, b. 1932, Middelburg, South Africa, lives in San Diego, California and South Africa.]
You call that work? Click-click with a camera. Are you mad?
Philippe Halsman
[Photographer, b. 1906, Riga, Latvia, d. 1979, New York.]
I drifted into photography like one drifts into prostitution. First I did it to please myself, then I did it to please my friends, and eventually I did it for money.
