Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]
The final strength in really great photographs is that they suggest more than just what they show literally.
Thomas Ruff
[Photographer, b. 1958, Zell, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf, Germany.]
A lot more happens between picture and viewer than you think... It’s all a matter of resolution. One could compare it to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal; the closer you look, the less you recognize.
Joel Meyerowitz
[Photographer, b. 1938, New York, lives in New York.]
We think of photography as pictures. And it is. But I think of photography as ideas. And do the pictures sustain your ideas or are they just good pictures? I want to have an experience in the world that is a deepening experience, that makes me feel alive and awake and conscious.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau
[Writer and theorist, b. 1947, New York, lives in Santa Barbara, California.]
“The thing itself” is never just out there in the world waiting to be framed by the photographer’s Leica; rather, it is something dynamically produced in the act of representation and reception and already subject to the grids of meaning imposed on it by culture, history, language, and so forth.
Bertolt Brecht
[Dramatist, director and poet, b. 1898, Augsburg, Germany, d. 1956, East Berlin.]
Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau
[Writer and theorist, b. 1947, New York, lives in Santa Barbara, California.]
As Plato insisted two thousand years ago, it is not by means of the image that moral, ethical, or political knowledge is produced.
Frederick Wiseman
[Filmmaker and Documentarian, b. 1930, Boston, Massachusetts, lives in Boston.]
It is always a problem to know what an image “means.”
Claude Lévi-Strauss
[Anthropologist, b. 1908, Brussels, Belgium, d. 2009, Paris.]
[Photography] remains servile to a “thoughtless” vision of the world… As the term snapshot suggests, photography seizes the moment and exhibits it.
