Ray Metzker
[Photographer, b. 1931, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, d. 2014, Philadelphia.]
I never wanted to make portraits—to photograph celebrities, beautiful people, beautiful landscapes, beautiful buildings, or people in distressing situations.... I have always been interested in everyman—average, ordinary people in everyday situations.
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.
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.
Neil Postman
[Writer and media critic, b. 1931, New York, d. 2003, Queens, New York.]
By itself photography cannot deal with the unseen, the remote, the internal, the abstract, it does not speak of “Man,” only of “a man”; not of “Tree,” only “a tree.”
Jean Baudrillard
[Writer and theorist, b. 1929, Reims, France, d. 2007, Paris.]
You think you photograph a particular scene for the pleasure it gives. In fact it’s the scene that wants to be photographed. You’re merely an extra in the production.
Eliot Porter
[Photographer, b. 1901, Winnetka, Illinois, d. 1990, Santa Fe, New Mexico.]
Sometimes you can tell a large story with a tiny subject.
Robert Rauschenberg
[Artist, b. 1925, Port Arthur, Texas, d. 2008, Captiva Island, Florida.]
I don’t want a picture to look like something it isn’t. I want it to look like something it is.
Ishiuchi Miyako
[Photographer, b. 1947, Gunma Prefecture, Japan, lives in Tokyo.]
The natural choice is to photograph what you like. I chose what I hated.
