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.
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.
Brian Duffy
[Photographer, b. 1933, London, d. 2010, London.]
One of the great problems with photography is that any twat you give a camera to can take a photograph. What that does to the photographer is immediately create an inferiority complex within him because anyone can do it, which of course they can.
Marcel Duchamp
[Artist, b. 1887, Blainville, France, d. 1968, Neilly-sur-Seine, France.]
Unless a picture shocks, it is nothing.
Lars Tunbjörk
[Photographer, b. 1956, Borås, Sweden, d. 2015, Stockholm.]
…I photographed a lot of empty interiors: welfare offices just after family therapy, empty reception rooms. I noticed that even after the people left, a feeling of them stayed in the room, a sense of sadness.
Marcel Proust
[Writer, b. 1871, Auteuil, Paris, d. 1922, Paris.]
Photography is the product of complete alienation.
Martin Parr
[Photographer, b. 1952, Epson, Surrey, England, lives in Bristol and London, England.]
Unless it hurts, unless there’s some vulnerability there, I don’t think you’re going to get good photographs.
Raymond Depardon
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1942, Villefranche-sur-Saône, France, lives in Paris.]
The photographer is filled with doubt. Nothing will soothe him.
