Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
I didn’t like the world of photography. I didn’t like the culture of photography. I feel the same way today.
(2011) 
Lee Friedlander
[Photographer, b. 1934, Aberdeen, Washington, lives in New York.]
[Garry Winogrand] was a bull of a man and the world his china shop.
Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Animal living is photographed full tide with barely a moment of lyricism, none of beauty, and tragedy only a match struck on the seat of the pants…. Actually Klein did not photograph a city; he matched with cheap sensational photography the vulgarity of life in all its ugliness.
(1957, On William Klein’s book New York
.)
Richard Prince
[Artist, b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone, lives in New York.]
I wish I had met [Francesca] Woodman forty years ago. It would have been great to live with her for a year. She didn’t save anything. She played the camera like a new guitar. She murdered herself out taking pictures...
André Kertész
[Photographer, b. 1894, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1985, New York.]
I gave him [Brassaï] a crash course on night photography: what to do, how to do it, and how long the exposures had to be. Later he started to copy my style in night photography and that, more or less, was the type of work he did for the rest of his life.
Paul Strand
[Photographer, b. 1890, New York, d. 1976, Oregeval, France.]
Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees. You may see and be affected by other people’s ways, you may even use them to find your own, but you will eventually have to free yourself of them. That is what Nietzsche meant when he said, “I have just read Schopenhauer, now I have to get rid of him.” He knew how insidious other people’s ways could be, particularly those which have the forcefulness of profound experience, if you let them get between you and your own vision.
Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
Deft, witty, spanking little poems of hate.
(Describing photographs by Lee Friedlander)
Elliott Erwitt
[Photographer, b. 1928, Paris, France, lives in New York.]
Quality doesn’t mean deep blacks and whatever tonal range. That’s not quality, that’s a kind of quality. The pictures of Robert Frank might strike someone as being sloppy—the tone range isn’t right and things like that—but they’re far superior to the pictures of Ansel Adams with regard to quality, because the quality of Ansel Adams, if I may say so, is essentially the quality of a postcard. But the quality of Robert Frank is a quality that has something to do with what he’s doing, what his mind is. It’s not balancing out the sky to the sand and so forth. It’s got to do with intention.
