Alec Soth
[Photographer, b. 1969, Minneapolis, Minnesota, lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.]
There’s a kind of beautiful loneliness in voyeurism. And that’s why I’m a photographer.
William Wegman
[Artist, b. 1943, Holyoke, Massachusetts, lives in New York.]
I get so confused about life photography art.
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.
Edward Steichen
[Photographer and curator, b. 1879, Luxembourg, Germany, d. 1973, West Redding, Connecticut.]
Once you really commence to see things, then you really commence to feel things.
Robert Frank
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1924, Zürich, Switzerland, lives in Mabou, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, and New York.]
I always say that I don’t want to be sentimental, that the photographs shouldn’t be sentimental, and yet, I am conscious of my sentimentality.
Donna Ferrato
[Photographer, b. 1949, Waltham, Massachusetts, lives in New York.]
Not for me the uninvolved wanderer with a camera—some invisible alien, coldly holding a tin box without a heart. My camera has feelings.
Edward Weston
[Photographer, b. 1886, Highland Park, Illinois, d. 1958, Wildcat Hill, California.]
My work is never intellectual. I never make a negative unless emotionally moved by my subject.
William Mortensen
[Photographer and writer, b. 1897, Park City, Utah, d. 1965, Laguna Beach, California.]
Emotion may be expressed, or the utter lack of it may be expressed, but the only important fact is that of
expression.
