Sally Mann
[Photographer, b. 1951, Lexington, Virginia, lives in Lexington.]
Photograph what is important to you, what is closest to you, photograph the great events of your life, and let your photography live with your reality.
Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
Everything is subject for photography, especially the difficult things of our lives: anxiety, childhood hurts, lust, nightmares. The things that cannot be seen are the most significant. They cannot be photographed, only suggested.
William Klein
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, lives in Paris.]
I thought New York had it coming, that it needed a kick in the balls. When I returned to New York, I wanted to get even. Now I had a weapon, photography.
William Henry Fox Talbot
[Mathematician and pioneer of photography, b. 1800, Melbury, Dorset, England, d. 1877, Lacock Abbey, England.]
…[the camera] chronicles whatever it sees, and certainly would delineate a chimney-pot or a chimney-sweeper with the same impartiality as it would the Apollo of Belvedere.
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.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
In photographing dwarfs, you don’t get majesty and beauty. You get dwarfs.
(On photographs by Diane Arbus)
Slim Aarons
[Photographer, b. 1916, New York, d. 2006, Montrose, New York.]
Photographing attractive people who were doing attractive things in attractive places.
(Summary of his photographic career)
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.
