Rondal Partridge
[Photographer, b. 1917, San Francisco, d. 2015, Berkeley, California.]
So many people are diverted to doing what people want photographed—fashion models, buildings, mountains—they get to thinking those photographs are good.
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.
Rineke Dijkstra
[Photographer, b. 1959, Sittard, The Netherlands, lives in Amsterdam.]
It’s like Diane Arbus said, you are looking for the “gap between intention and effect.” People think that they present themselves one way, but they cannot help but show something else as well. It’s impossible to have
everything under control.
Eliot Porter
[Photographer, b. 1901, Winnetka, Illinois, d. 1990, Santa Fe, New Mexico.]
Sometimes you can tell a large story with a tiny subject.
Stephen Shore
[Photographer, b. 1947, New York, lives in New York.]
To see something spectacular and recognize it as a photographic possibility is not making a very big leap. But to see something ordinary, something you’d see every day, and recognize it as a photographic possibility—that is what I am interested in.
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 Frank
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1924, Zürich, Switzerland, lives in Mabou, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, and New York.]
You can photograph anything now.
Weegee (Usher Fellig)
[Photographer, b. 1899, Zlothew near Lemberg, Austrian Galicia (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), d. 1968, New York.]
The same camera that photographs a murder scene can photograph a beautiful society affair at a big hotel.
