Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
What do you think I’m a professor of? The little finger?
(On offers of honorary doctorates.) 
Bill Jay
[Photographer, writer, and curator, b. 1940, Maidenhead, England, d. 2009, Samara, Costa Rica.]
Formal education [in photography] has a lot to answer for. We have legitimized, sanitized, academized the medium until we are left with issues not substance, critical stances not action. We have encouraged the mimicking of already dead images, like 19th century painters who spent years copying Greek statuary.
Lord Snowdon (Antony Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones)
[Earl and photographer, b. 1930, London, England, d. 2017, London.]
I think it’s all absolute nonsense how people talk about photography as being an art. It’s a very menial career that you do if you draw badly. Now they teach it at the Royal College of Art and get grand about it. It’s the only course there that I don’t understand.
Harry Callahan
[Photographer, b. 1912, Detroit, Michigan, d. 1999, Atlanta, Georgia.]
I really didn’t have much to teach. I didn’t even believe in it. I felt so strongly that everybody had to find their own way... In terms of art, the only real answer that I know of is to do it. If you don’t do it, you don’t know what might happen.
Larry Sultan
[Photographer, b. 1946, Brooklyn, New York, d. 2009, Greenbrae, California.]
...when it comes down to making work that really sings, I don’t know if I can teach any of it. I don’t even know if I can do any of it half the time. It’s so much about failure, it’s so much about making pictures that are so utterly boring and overstated, you’re endlessly disappointed. And in that process you hopefully find something that draws you back and calls to you.
Sophie Calle
[Artist, b. 1953, Paris, lives in Paris and New York.]
I met a photographer who agreed to give me a few lessons; in exchange, I had to pose naked for him.
Thomas Ruff
[Photographer, b. 1958, Zell, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf, Germany.]
I received my training at an art academy, so what I produce is art. That’s what is artistic about my photographs.
Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
Not having gone to photography school, I never learned the rules.
