Laurel Nakadate
[Video artist and photographer, b. 1975, Austin, Texas, lives in New York.]
I would take this bus from Harvard Square that picked up Harvard and MIT boys... It was called the Fuck Bus. I’d ride the Fuck Bus with a bunch of eighteen-year-old boys, and I’d have my camera and my video camera... Essentially, for four years I watched girls get really drunk on their parents’ dollar and take off their clothes for visiting boys and professors. I watched the whole thing, and that’s where I got my start taking pictures, I guess.
Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
What moves me about... what’s called technique... is that it comes from some mysterious deep place. I mean it can have something to do with the paper and the developer and all that stuff, but it comes mostly from some very deep choices somebody has made that take a long time and keep haunting them.
Lola Alvarez Bravo
[Photographer, b. 1907, Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, Mexico, d. 1993, Mexico City.]
If I came out a photographer it’s because I knew about painting, composition, and the handling of light.
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.
Andy Grundberg
[Critic, curator, and educator, lives in Washington, D.C.]
...the essential Postmodern point about photographs and other lens-based images—that by dint of their reproducibility and fecundity they have created a world unto themselves—still holds. Besides changing the nature and capacity of our vision of the observable world, photography has fundamentally changed photography.
Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
Every artist who feels he has a style is a little wary automatically of strong work in view. I suppose we are all a little insecure. I don’t like to look at too much of Atget’s work because I am too close to that in style myself... It’s a little residue of insecurity and fear of such magnificent strength and style there. If it happens to border on yours, it makes you wonder how original you are.
Tod Papageorge
[Photographer, b. 1940, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, lives in New Haven, Connecticut.]
All the failed pictures you’ve ever made, all of the other photographs you’ve ever loved, even songs and lines from poems walk with you, insinuating themselves into your decisions about what you’ll make your photographs of, and how you’ll shape them as pictures. The process, if anything, is intuitive rather than the product of planning—although the fact that very few people have been able to produce this kind of work at a high level also suggests how difficult it is. In other words,
intuitive may not be an adequate word for describing the stew of wildness, dogged work and hard thought that goes into producing this kind of [street] photography.
Roger Ballen
[Photographer, b. 1950, New York, lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.]
In the end, I believe that the most important influence on my aesthetic has been the photographs I have taken.
