Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
Get Weston off your back, forget Arbus, Frank, Adams, White, don’t look at photographs. Kill the Buddha.
Marion Post Wolcott
[Photographer, b. 1910, Bloomfield, New Jersey, d. 1990, Santa Barbara, California.]
When I took the FSA job, I already had battle scars. I had weathered... the first weeks as a female full-time staff photographer on the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin... The ten male photographers with whom I was to work, immediately put out their cigarette butts in my developer, spit in and hypoed it, probably peed in it; threw spit balls into my cubby-hole darkroom until my aim and speed became better than theirs. Finally, I exploded—telling them I was there to stay... That did it; we reached a truce... soon each one confidentially telling me that the others were wolves and he was going to be my protector.
Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
If you read what, say, Weston was writing in the 1920s he talked about an industrial medium, reflective surfaces, contemporary subject matter—it’s a straighter line to [Ed] Ruscha’s
26 Gas Stations than it would ever be to Ansel Adam’s pictures of Yosemite and their kitschy calendar sensibility.
Man Ray (Emanuel Radnitsky)
[Artist, b. 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1976, Paris.]
Look at this Avedon, he photographs famous people. I photograph people who were unknown and become famous later.
(Quoted by photographer William Klein)
Joan Fontcuberta
[Photographer, b. 1955, Barcelona, lives in Barcelona.]
I need there to be documentary photographers, because my work is meta-documentary; it is a commentary about the documentary use of photography.
John Berger
[Writer and critic, b. 1926, London, d. 2017, Paris.]
We hate to look at his [Donald McCullin’s] pictures, but we have to. McCullin is the eye we cannot shut.
John Waters
[Filmmaker and photographer, b. 1946, Baltimore, Maryland, lives in Baltimore.]
For most people, the word voyeur is a bad word; to me, it’s a realistic one. Whatever your secret obsession is, that’s what you need to look at again and again and again. It doesn’t matter what it is. Was Ansel Adams—who spent a lifetime looking at mountains, making pictures, and getting off on them—a
voyeur?
Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]
Many photographers in fact remind me in temperament of Thomas Hart Benton; in addition to painting, he said, what he liked was to “drink whiskey and talk big.”
