Vik Muniz
[Artist, b. 1961, Sao Paulo, Brazil, lives in New York.]
If you find an idea without form, please let me know because I would love to take a picture of it.
Thomas Struth
[Photographer, b. 1954, Geldern, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf.]
The image of an empty landscape accommodates the medium of photography in so far as it always involves the present, despite being historically referential.
William Wegman
[Artist, b. 1943, Holyoke, Massachusetts, lives in New York.]
My Weimaraners are perfect fashion models. Their elegant, slinky forms are covered in gray—and gray, everyone knows, goes with anything.
Eva Rubinstein
[Photographer, b. 1933, Buenos Aires, Argentina, lives in New York and Paris.]
That’s all the difficulty and the challenge and the battle: to look through this mechanical thing, these bits of glass and metal, at someone. And not lose the sense that this “shape” is a human being.
William Eggleston
[Photographer, b. 1939, Memphis, Tennessee, lives in Memphis.]
I had an old Canon and a Leica, but I didn’t know the first thing about photography. Never learnt it off anybody either. It quickly came to be that I grew interested in photographing whatever was there wherever I happened to be. For any reason.
Pipilotti Rist
[Artist, b. 1962, Reinthal, Switzerland, lives in Zurich and Los Angeles.]
I always try to create equal power between the subject and the object, so as not to end up creating a relationship where the camera is here and the object out there. This is for me a very difficult and sensitive balance. When I produce a work, cut and frame images, I realize that spectators can identify with the images and almost forget that someone else actually made them. This would be the optimal situation. I don’t know whether I succeed in doing so, but that’s what I would like to have happen.
Henry Holmes Smith
[Artist and teacher, b. 1909, Bloomington, Illinois, d. 1986, San Rafael, California.]
In a world of disturbing images, the general body of photography is bland, dealing complacently with nature and treating our preconceptions as insights. Strange, private worlds rarely slip past our guard...
Frederick Sommer
[Photographer, b. 1905, Angri, Italy, d. 1999, Prescott, Arizona.]
If I could find them [assemblages] in nature I would photograph them. I make them because through photography I have a knowledge of things that can’t be found.
