Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
I’m not responsible for my photographs. Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. It’s drowning yourself, dissolving yourself and then sniff, sniff, sniff—being sensitive to coincidence. You can’t go looking for it; you can’t want it, or you won’t get it. First you must lose your self. Then it happens.
Bea Nettles
[Photographer, b. 1946, Gainesville, Florida, lives in Asheville, North Carolina.]
I feel that rather than “taking” photographs, I am making them. I freely use any materials to make my images... thread, dust, cloth, plastic, pencil, mirrors, as well as my photographic paper and film. I’m trying to stretch and share the limits of my imagination: that is why and how I continue to work.
Ilse Bing
[Photographer, b. 1899, Frankfurt, Germany, d. 1998, New York.]
I felt that the camera grew an extension of my eyes and moved with me.
John Pfahl
[Photographer, b. 1939, New York, lives in Buffalo, New York.]
I want to make photographs whose very ambiguity provokes thought, rather than cuts it off prematurely. I want to make pictures that work on a more mysterious level, that approach the truth by a more circuitous route.
Ernst Haas
[Photographer, b. 1921, Vienna, Austria, d. 1986, New York City.]
Leica, schmeica. The camera doesn’t make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But you have to see.
Frank Gohlke
[Photographer, b. 1942, Wichita Falls, Texas, lives in Southborough, Massachusetts.]
Whatever the aspect, I’ve tried to provide clear witness to what I’ve found, to resonate well enough with the harmonics of the place that the tuning can be felt in the pictures.
Garry Winogrand
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, d. 1984, Tijuana, Mexico.]
There is no special way a photograph should look.
Philippe Halsman
[Photographer, b. 1906, Riga, Latvia, d. 1979, New York.]
I assure you that often, before approaching the person, my heart would beat, and I would have to fight down all my inhibitions in order to address this request to my subject. At every time when the subject agreed to jump, it was for me like a kind of victory.
