Man Ray (Emanuel Radnitsky)
[Artist, b. 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1976, Paris.]
I would photograph an idea rather than an object, a dream rather than an idea.
Robert Mapplethorpe
[Photographer, b. 1946, Floral Park, Long Island, d. 1989, Boston, Massachusetts.]
My whole point is to transcend the subject… go beyond the subject somehow, so that the composition, the lighting, all around, reaches a certain point of perfection.
Edward Weston
[Photographer, b. 1886, Highland Park, Illinois, d. 1958, Wildcat Hill, California.]
Anything that excites me for any reason I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual.
William Carlos Williams
[Writer and poet, b. 1883, Rutherford, New Jersey, d. 1963, Rutherford.]
No ideas but in things.
Paul Graham
[Photographer, b. 1956, Stafford, England, lives in New York.]
...my photography doesn’t always fit into neat, coherent projects, so maybe I need to roll freeform around this world, unfettered, able to photograph whatever and whenever: the sky, my feet, the coffee in my cup, the flowers I just noticed, my friends and lovers, and, because it’s all my life, surely it will make sense? Perhaps.
Dorothea Lange
[Photographer, b. 1895, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1965, San Francisco.]
Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion... the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.
Grant Mudford
[Photographer, b. 1944, Sydney, Australia, lives in Los Angeles.]
I realized eventually that if I was really on top of what I was doing, I should be able to make photographs out of almost anything.
Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
The world was already in the condition of art, waiting to be noticed as such. As Robert Irwin famously said, “I feel like a man sitting beside a river selling water.”
