Henry Holmes Smith
[Artist and teacher, b. 1909, Bloomington, Illinois, d. 1986, San Rafael, California.]
Somebody said recently that the best thing a student could do was to get in some shows and publish a book; but nothing about becoming a human being, nothing about having important feelings or concepts of humanity. That’s the sort of thing that is bad education. I’d say be a human being first and if you happen to wind up using photography, that’s good for photography.
Hiroshi Hamaya
[Photographer, b. 1915, Tokyo, Japan, d. 1999, Kanagawa, Japan.]
The subject I liked best was painting, but the teachers didn't approve of my experiments and sometimes criticized me in front of the whole class. Maybe my love for photography came from that humiliation: a photo is something that you develop and print yourself, in the dark, and that remains in the dark until you decide to show it.
John Loengard
[Photographer, editor, and critic, b. 1934, New York, lives in New York.]
When I teach a class I often give the assignment: “Photograph someone you love.” I ask people to do this so they have a subject about whom they have feelings, a subject that is more than a model, or an object, or a shape, or an idea. In this way, they can judge the result not only by its technical success, but also by how well it describes their feelings.
William Claxton
[Photographer, b. 1927, Pasadena, California, d. 2008, Los Angeles.]
The international language of jazz and photography need no special education or sophistication to be enjoyed. All that I ask is that you listen with your eyes.
A.D. Coleman
[Critic and writer, b. 1943, New York, lives in New York.]
Photography is, in its relation to the casual camera user, an inordinately generous medium. Most anyone who exposes a goodly amount of film (or even a small amount regularly) ends up with a certain proportion of negative which, appropriately rendered in print form, could provide images of at least passing interest.
Nick Knight
[Photographer, b. 1958, London, England, lives in London.]
I think, really, you’re sucked into photography when you first start doing it because it’s a very easy medium to do. Most cameras are pretty good and you’ll get an image which is coherent and looks like images you have seen pretty much straight away. It’s not like learning something like sculpture or painting where you have to learn a discipline beforehand. You pick it up and it’s there, it’s easy.
Martin Parr
[Photographer, b. 1952, Epson, Surrey, England, lives in Bristol and London, England.]
When I first started learning how to take photographs, you had to spend the first six months figuring out what an f-stop was. Now you just go and take pictures. Nobody thinks about technical issues anymore because cameras or camera phones take care of that automatically.
Helmut Newton
[Photographer, b. 1920, Berlin, d. 2004, Los Angeles.]
My advice for the young? There are two dirty words in photography; one is “art,” and the other is “good taste.”
