Marc Riboud
[Photographer, b. 1923, St.-Genis-Laval, France, d. 2016, Paris.]
Instinctively, I feel that good photographs come from being surprised.
Susie Linfield
[Writer and critic, New York, lives in New York.]
The ability of photographs to conjure deep emotion is one of their great strengths. But this power—precisely because it is divorced from narrative, political context, and analysis—is equally a danger. Ironically, the more searing an image… the more misleading it can be.
Gordon Parks
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1912, Fort Scott, Kansas, d. 2006, New York.]
... I feel it’s the heart, not the eye, that should determine the content of the photograph. What the eye sees is its own. What the heart can perceive is a very different matter.
Ishiuchi Miyako
[Photographer, b. 1947, Gunma Prefecture, Japan, lives in Tokyo.]
One must be a bit cold to be the one taking photos.
Marcel Proust
[Writer, b. 1871, Auteuil, Paris, d. 1922, Paris.]
Photography is the product of complete alienation.
Sally Mann
[Photographer, b. 1951, Lexington, Virginia, lives in Lexington.]
To be able to take my pictures, I have to look, all the time, at the people and places I care about. And I must do so with both ardor and cool appraisal, with the passions of eye and heart, but in that ardent heart there must also be a splinter of ice.
John Divola
[Photographer, b. 1949, Los Angeles, lives in Los Angeles.]
In all my work there’s this notion of the melancholic. You can make a photograph about the sublime, but you can’t make the sublime itself.
James Nachtwey
[Photographer, b. 1948, Syracuse, New York, lives in New York.]
If I can upset people, if I can ruin their day, then I have done my job.
