Richard Avedon
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 2004, San Antonio, Texas.]
Nothing about [Diane Arbus’s] life, her photographs, or her death was accidental or ordinary. They were mysterious and decisive and unimaginable, except to her. Which is the way it is with genius.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks!
(1930s)
Andreas Feininger
[Photographer, b. 1906, Paris, France, d. 1999, New York.]
Photographers — idiots, of which there are so many — say, “Oh, if only I had a Nikon or a Leica, I could make great photographs.” That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard in my life. It’s nothing but a matter of seeing, and thinking, and interest.
Imogen Cunningham
[Photographer, b. 1883, Portland, d. 1976, San Francisco.]
You know, a documentary is only interesting once in a while. If you look at a whole book of Dorothea [Lange]’s where she has row after row of people bending over and digging out carrots—that can be very tedious. And so it’s only once in a while that something happens that is worth doing.
Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
I remember that for some California photography exhibition in the 1980s, someone interviewed Robert Fichter, who described the photo community as being like a lovely little sun-drenched Greek Island. I thought that was really generous. I thought it more Appalachia than Santorini: some dank mountain valley where brothers have been screwing their sisters for generations, and everybody talks a little bit funny.
John Szarkowski
[Curator, critic, historian, and photographer, b. 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, d. 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]
The whole company of Arbus imitators, in the years after her death, thought they could do what she had done by using the camera simply and directly. Unfortunately, they were simple and direct people, whereas she was complex and patient.
Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]
Your own photography is never enough. Every photographer who has lasted has depended on other people’s pictures too—photographs that may be public or private, serious or funny, but that carry with them a reminder of community.
Brian Duffy
[Photographer, b. 1933, London, d. 2010, London.]
I went into a burning mode. I felt everything I had to do and say in photography had been done. [Irving Penn and Richard Avedon] fucked photography for us... They got there.
(1979, On giving up photography and burning all his negatives)
