Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
Nobody knows what art is, and it can’t be taught. It’s the mind and the talent of the eye of the individual who is operating the machine that produces what comes out of it.
Robert Heinecken
[Photographer, b. 1931, Denver, d. 2006, Albuquerque, New Mexico.]
I was never in a school situation where someone said, “This is the way a photograph is supposed to look.” I was completely open to cut them up, or do anything like that. I think if I had been in touch with people earlier, then I wouldn’t have felt comfortable doing that. It would have been too bizarre.
Tibor Kalman
[Graphic designer, b. 1949, Budapest, d. 1999, Dorado, Puerto Rico.]
Could you blow this up really big and print it in the wrong color and tell everybody to go back to school and to remember that form ain’t worth shit anyway and that content ideas you big bunch of jerks rules make that part red or something ok?
Wendy Ewald
[Photographer and educator, b. 1951, Detroit, Michigan, lives in Rhinebeck, New York.]
Sometimes I think I disguise myself as a teacher in order to make the pictures I need to see.
Henry Holmes Smith
[Artist and teacher, b. 1909, Bloomington, Illinois, d. 1986, San Rafael, California.]
People are competing to win at a game that is a loser’s game. The game is to have better routine images than someone else’s routine images. If you want a prescription for routine images, you just have to go through any student’s portfolio.
Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
Art schools, it seems to me, can be pretty great places. If you do nothing more than hang out a sign saying ‘Art School’ a lot of interesting, creative people will start coming through the door.
Jacob Riis
[Photographer and reformer, b. 1849, Denmark, d. 1914, Barre, Massachusetts.]
I do not want [photography] explained to me in terms of... formulas, learned, but so hopelessly unsatisfying. I do not want my butterfly stuck on a pin and put in a glass case. I want to see the sunlight on its wings as it flits from flower to flower and I don’t care a rap what its Latin name may be.
Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon)
[Photographer, b. 1820, Paris, d. 1910, Paris.]
The theory of photography can be taught in an hour, preliminary technical notions in a day... What cannot be taught is the moral intelligence of the subject, or the instinctive tact that puts you in touch with the model, allowing you to size them up and to steer them toward their habits, their ideas, according to each person's character. This enables you to offer something more than the ordinary, accidental plastic reproduction that the humblest laboratory assistant could manage. It enables you to achieve the most familiar, the most positive resemblance: a speaking likeness. This is the psychological side of photography. I don’t think that is too ambitious a term.
