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.”
Jock Sturges
[Photographer, b. 1947, New York, lives in San Francisco.]
People need to realize that a cultural war has been declared here. A virulent, aggressive minority has decided that Americans don’t know themselves what it is they should see, and need to be protected by people who are wiser than they are, even if they are only a tiny sliver of the population. This represents a whole new level of attention to the arts by repressive forces. It’s very scary, and it has to be withstood.
Ben Shahn
[Photographer and artist, b. 1898, Kovno, Russia (now Kaunas, Lithuania), d. 1969, New York.]
I confess that Roy [Stryker] was a little bit dictatorial in his editing and he ruined quite a number of my pictures, which he stopped doing later. He used to punch a hole through a negative. Some of them were incredibly valuable. He didn’t understand at the time.
Man Ray (Emanuel Radnitsky)
[Artist, b. 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1976, Paris.]
It looked like a snowstorm, with the flakes flying in all directions instead of falling, then suddenly becoming a field of daisies as if the snow had crystallized into flowers. This was followed by another sequence of huge white pins crisscrossing and revolving in an epileptic dance, then again by a lone thumbtack making desperate efforts to leave the screen. There was some grumbling in the audience, punctuated by a whistle or two. Then the film broke, not once, but twice. A cry for the lights arose, the theater lit up disclosing a group locked in a struggle preventing the participants from striking any blows. Small groups in other parts of the theater were seen, divided into two camps, engaged in similar activities. A group of police stationed outside in anticipation of trouble rushed in and succeeded in emptying the theater.
(On the first showing of Rayograph film "Return to Reason")
Eugene Richards
[Photographer, b. 1944, Dorchester, Massachusetts, lives in New York.]
Photojournalist? With a few exceptions, those of us working as photojournalists might now more appropriately call ourselves illustrators. For, unlike real reporters, whose job it is to document what’s going down, most of us go out in the world expecting to give form to the magazine, or to newspaper editor’s ideas, using what’s become over the years a pretty standardized visual language. So we search for what is instantly recognizable, supportive of the text, easiest to digest, or most marketable—more mundane realities be damned.
Helmut Newton
[Photographer, b. 1920, Berlin, d. 2004, Los Angeles.]
I find myself, after all these years, with a built-in safety-brake that stops me from doing certain things. And one of the reasons why I want to try so called hard pornography—I don’t even know whether it’s hard enough—is to see whether I will be able to overcome this. Because if there is one thing I hate, it’s good taste, to me it’s a dirty word.
David Hockney
[Artist, b. 1937, Bradford, England, lives in Bridlington, Yorkshire; London; and Los Angeles.]
…I’ve come to see that [artist Robert] Irwin was right about that ban on photographing his work; I wish I’d imposed a similar ban regarding my own from the outset. I mean, no one can come upon one of my paintings in a museum, say, and simply see
it; instead they see the poster in their college dorm or the dentist’s office or the jacket on the book they are reading, all sorts of second-rate mediations getting in the way of experiencing the work as if from scratch.
It’s time to debate images, especially when someone’s going to prison for downloading them.
