Manuel Álvarez Bravo
[Photographer, b. 1902, Mexico City, d. 2002, Mexico City.]
Before the Conquest all art was of the people, and popular art has never ceased to exist in Mexico. The art called popular is fugitive in character, with less of the impersonal and intellectual characteristics of the schools. It is the work of talent nourished by personal experience and that of the community—rather than being taken from the experiences of painters in other times and other cultures.
Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
Get Weston off your back, forget Arbus, Frank, Adams, White, don’t look at photographs. Kill the Buddha.
Wynn Bullock
[Photographer, b. 1902, Chicago, Illinois, d. 1975, Monterey, California.]
My thinking has been deeply affected by the belief that all things are some form of radiant energy. Light is perhaps the most profound truth in the universe.
Justine Kurland
[Photographer, b. 1969, Warsaw, New York, lives mostly on the road.]
I started going to museums at an early age, but my imagery is equally influenced by illustrations from the fairy tales I read as a child.
Joel-Peter Witkin
[Photographer, b. 1939, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.]
Artists are the people among us who realize creation didn’t stop on the sixth day.
Amy Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1954, New York, lives in New York.]
It’s entirely ridiculous and hopeless to try to compete with somebody who made such a huge contribution to photography... I knew when I went into photography that I would be compared to my mother. I thought to myself, what can I do about that?
Laurie Simmons
[Photographer, b. 1949, Long Island, New York, lives in New York.]
I realized early on that artifice attracted me to an image more than any other quality—I mean artifice in the sense of staging and heightened color and exaggerated lighting, not a surreal or fictive moment… I think the lighting and feeling of Cinemascope, the movies I saw as a kid, always stayed with me as a kind of glorious vision of reality.
Helmut Newton
[Photographer, b. 1920, Berlin, d. 2004, Los Angeles.]
My mother always said: “If you have any problems, Helmut, don’t tell us, tell the doctor.”
