John Baldessari
[Artist, b. 1931, National City, California, lives in Venice, California.]
Find the most puzzling kind of art you can think of, and then go out and try to approximate it with your camera. Take a photograph that corresponds to it.
(Assignment to students.) 
John Divola
[Photographer, b. 1949, Los Angeles, lives in Los Angeles.]
It’s good to be around people who see [photography] as a reasonable enterprise when everyone in the neighborhood may think it’s ridiculous.
(On the benefit of teaching photography)
Gregory Crewdson
[Photographer, b. 1962, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New Haven Connecticut.]
The reason I teach is because it’s a privileged atmosphere, where you can talk about photographs in a place where the people really care about them. That’s rare and unusual.
William Eggleston
[Photographer, b. 1939, Memphis, Tennessee, lives in Memphis.]
I had an old Canon and a Leica, but I didn’t know the first thing about photography. Never learnt it off anybody either. It quickly came to be that I grew interested in photographing whatever was there wherever I happened to be. For any reason.
Alexey Brodovitch
[Graphic designer and art director, b. 1898, Ogolitchi, Russia, d. 1971, Le Thor, France.]
When the novice photographer starts taking pictures, he carries his camera about and shoots everything that interests him. There comes a time when he must crystallize his ideas and set off in a particular direction. He must learn that shooting for the sake of shooting is dull and unprofitable.
Tina Barney
[Photographer, b. 1945, New York, lives in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, and New York.]
[My advice to a beginning photographer is] sit down with a pencil and paper and think about what your life is about. What you are about. Don’t even take a camera into your hands before you figure that out.
W. Eugene Smith
[Photographer, b. 1918, Wichita, Kansas, d. 1978, Tucson, Arizona.]
If I can get them to think, get them to feel, get them to see, then I’ve done about all that I can as a teacher.
Donald McCullin
[Photographer, b. 1935, Finsbury Park, London, lives in Somerset, England.]
The colleges are turning out photographers like strings of sausages.
