Bert Stern
[Photographer, b. 1929, Brooklyn, New York, d. 2013, New York.]
What makes a great model is her need, her desire; and it’s exciting to photograph desire.
Gregory Crewdson
[Photographer, b. 1962, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New Haven Connecticut.]
What I’m after, what I’ve always been after is a picture that tells a story. I see it all in my head beforehand, and I set out obsessively—maybe even narcissistically—to make it. Very little is improvised in the end, though I am open to serendipity in some details. In part I see what I am doing as exploring the American psyche through the American vernacular landscape, much as Hopper did.
John Coplans
[Artist, critic, and curator, b. 1920, London, d. 2003, New York.]
The principal thing is the question of how our culture views age: that old is ugly. Take a photographer like Mapplethorpe. Every single photograph of his is about classical notions of beauty, of young beautiful black men, young beautiful women, and he selects subjects who are essentially interesting and good-looking and extremely physical. I can’t stand them.
André Kertész
[Photographer, b. 1894, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1985, New York.]
This is a photograph of the apartment taken while my wife was in the hospital. I wanted the apartment to be painted for her when she came back, but she never came back.
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Man Ray (Emanuel Radnitsky)
[Artist, b. 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1976, Paris.]
Were it not for the fact that photography permits me to seize and to possess the human body and face in more than a temporary manner, I should quickly have tired of this medium.
Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
I’ve thought that when people appear in a picture, they automatically are perceived as the subject, irrespective of how they are represented. I wanted the only person in the picture to be the viewer.
George Santayana
[Philosopher and writer, b. 1863, Madrid, Spain, d. 1952, Rome, Italy.]
Photography at first was asked to do nothing but embalm our best smiles for the benefit of our friends and our best clothes for the amusement of posterity. Neither thing lasts, and photography came as a welcome salve to keep those precious, if slightly ridiculous, things a little longer in the world.
Arthur Tress
[Photographer, b. 1940, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Cambria, California.]
The photographic frame is no longer used as a documentary window into undisturbed private lives, but as a stage on which the subjects consciously direct themselves to bring forward hidden information that is not normally displayed on the surface.
