Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]
Mainly, you photograph because it’s fun. It’s serious too, but that’s the other side of fun.
Shirin Neshat
[Artist, photographer, and filmmaker, b. 1957, Qazvin, Iran, lives in New York.]
Beautiful woman wrapped in chadors, with huge machine guns in their hands. Brilliant, shocking, amazingly contradictory images. They compelled me to deeply investigate these ideas.
Chuck Close
[Artist, b. 1940, Monroe, Washington, lives in New York.]
I always say that inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.
Eve Arnold
[Photographer, b. 1913, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 2011, London.]
What drove me and kept me going over the decades? If I had to use a single word, it would be “curiosity.”
Arthur Tress
[Photographer, b. 1940, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Cambria, California.]
Photography is my method for defining the confusing world that rushes constantly toward me. It is my defensive attempt to reduce our daily chaos to a set of understandable images.
Larry Clark
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1943, Tulsa, Oklahoma, lives in New York.]
The work all comes from a psychological need. See the images that I make… It’s really a psychological need. I’m just jerked around by it. I’m pulled by it.
Richard Prince
[Artist, b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone, lives in New York.]
We do not make art. We have unnamable motors and dangerous impulses that occupy our thoughts.
Ben Shahn
[Photographer and artist, b. 1898, Kovno, Russia (now Kaunas, Lithuania), d. 1969, New York.]
I became interested in photography when I found my own sketching was inadequate.
