Mary Ellen Mark
[Photographer, b. 1940, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, d. 2015, New York.]
To touch on people’s lives [in a way they] haven’t been touched on before, it’s fascinating. You know, it’s one thing if [a celebrity] has an incredible character and you’re really going to be able to delve into their personality—that’s great. But you can never get real purity if people have been spoiled by the camera and don’t trust you. I like feeling that I’m able to be a voice for those people who aren’t famous, the people that don’t have the great opportunities.
Sebastião Salgado
[Photographer, b. 1944, Aimores, Minas Gerias, Brazil, lives in Paris and Brazil.]
I have been photographing the portrait of an end of an era, as machines and computers replace human workers. What we have in these pictures is an archeology.
Gordon Parks
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1912, Fort Scott, Kansas, d. 2006, New York.]
You know, the camera is not meant just to show misery. You can show beauty with it; you can do a lot of things. You can show—with a camera you can show things that you like about the universe, things you hate about the universe. It's capable of doing both. And I think that after nearly 85 years upon this planet that I have a right after working so hard at showing the desolation and the poverty, to show something beautiful as well. It’s all there, and you've only done half the job if you don’t do that.
Peter Bunnell
[Writer and photo historian, b. 1937, Poughkeepsie, New York, lives in Princeton, New Jersey.]
In photography, the issue of the integration of form and content is exceptionally difficult because of the widely held belief that photographs must be a kind of vicarious experience of the subject itself.
Justine Kurland
[Photographer, b. 1969, Warsaw, New York, lives mostly on the road.]
There’s this way that photography is always about going out searching. I’m not the kind of a photographer who can photograph my home.
Roy DeCarava
[Photographer, b. 1919, New York, d. 2009, Brooklyn, New York.]
My photographs are subjective and personal—they’re intended to be accessible, to relate to people’s lives... People—their well-being and survival—are the crux of what’s important to me.
Penelope Umbrico
[Photographer, b. 1957, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
I am not interested in producing work that shows how I see, in that literal manner that photographs can confirm.
Georgia O'Keeffe
[Artist, b. 1887, Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, d. 1986, Santa Fe, New Mexico.]
…subject matter, as subject matter, has nothing to so with the aesthetic significance of a photograph any more than with a painting.
