William J. T. Mitchell
[Writer, theorist, and architect, b. 1944, Melbourne, Australia, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Pictures of pain are not necessarily painful pictures, and this is why our response to them fluctuates between shame and delight, horror and pleasure.
Jean Paul Sartre
[Writer and philosopher, b. 1905, Paris, d. 1980, Paris.]
Here I am, bent over the keyhole; suddenly I hear a footstep. I shudder as a wave of shame sweeps over me. Somebody has seen me.
Paolo Pellegrin
[Photographer, b. 1964, Rome, lives in Paris.]
We photographers live in a constant state of schizophrenia because of what we see, what we feel and what we have to overcome.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
If I like a photograph, if it disturbs me, I linger over it.
Edward Weston
[Photographer, b. 1886, Highland Park, Illinois, d. 1958, Wildcat Hill, California.]
Those who feel nothing, or not completely at the
time of exposure, relying upon subsequent manipulation to reach an unpremeditated end, are predestined to failure.
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.
Emmet Gowin
[Photographer, b. 1941, Danville, Virginia, lives in Princeton, New Jersey.]
The challenge of photography is to show the thing photographed so that our feelings are awakened and hidden aspects are revealed.
