André Kertész
[Photographer, b. 1894, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1985, New York.]
You don’t see the things you photograph, you feel them.
Allan Sekula
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1951, Erie, Pennsylvania, d. 2013, Los Angeles.]
Communications technologies—photographic reproduction, linked computers—provide strong tools for the instrumental channeling of human desire… disguised as a benign expansion of the field of human intimacy. (2002)
Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
There are several tenets that go with this craft of ours. One of them is that the real gift and value in a picture is really not a thought; it is a sensation based on feeling.
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.
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.
Philip Jones Griffiths
[Photojournalist, b. 1936, Rhuddian, Wales, d. 2008, London.]
I attempt to channel my anger into the tip of my forefinger as I press the shutter.
Ruth Orkin
[Photographer, b. 1921, Boston, Massachusetts, d. 1985, New York.]
My mother said that when I was young I was constantly saying, “Look at this—Look at that.” I think that taking pictures must be my way of asking people to “Look at this—Look at that.” If my photographs make the viewer feel what I did when I first took them—“Isn’t this funny... terrible... moving... beautiful?”—then I’ve accomplished my purpose.
Gregory Crewdson
[Photographer, b. 1962, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New Haven Connecticut.]
... I’m interested in using the iconography of nature and the American landscape as surrogates or metaphors for psychological anxiety, fear or desire.