James Welling
[Photographer, b. 1951, Hartford, Connecticut, lives in Los Angeles.]
It’s not that I don’t care about content, but content is not the only way a photograph has meaning.
Kansuke Yamagata
[Photographer and poet, b. 1914, Nagoya, Japan, d. 1987, Nagoya.]
It’s more important what you photograph than how you express what you do.
Sally Mann
[Photographer, b. 1951, Lexington, Virginia, lives in Lexington.]
The hardest part is setting the camera on the tripod, or making the decision to bring the camera out of the car, or just raising the camera to your face, believing, by those actions, that whatever you find before you,
whatever you find there, is going to be good.
Jay Maisel
[Photographer, b. 1931, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New York.]
I take pictures, and they are there for the taking. I’ll tell you a quote that I have always thought about. Arthur Miller said, “I try to create the poem from the evidence.”
Penelope Umbrico
[Photographer, b. 1957, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
I have always been more interested in how we as a culture see things than how I see in particular.
Andy Warhol
[Artist, b. 1928, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, d. 1987, New York.]
During this period [1960s] I took thousands of Polaroids of genitals. Whenever somebody came up to the Factory, no matter how straight-looking he was, I’d ask him to take his pants off so I could photograph his cock and balls... Personally, I loved porno and I bought lots of it all the time—the really dirty, exciting stuff. All you had to do was figure out what turned you on, and then just buy the dirty magazines and movie prints that are right for you, the way you’d go for the right pills or right cans of food.
Ken Domon
[Photographer, b. 1909, Sakata, Japan, d. 1990, Tokyo.]
We should pay attention to the screaming voice of the subject and simply operate the camera exactly according to its indications. When the camera is operated according to these indications, the direct connection between the camera and the subject appears before us.
Katy Grannan
[Photographer, b. 1969, Arlington, Virginia, lives in Berkeley, California.]
Despite all the pictures in the world, there’s so much that’s unseen—people, landscapes, entire regions, small gestures, overlooked details.
