Bert Stern
[Photographer, b. 1929, Brooklyn, New York, d. 2013, New York.]
I was preparing for Marilyn’s arrival like a lover, and yet I was here to take photographs. Not to take her in my arms, but to turn her into tones, and planes, and shapes, and ultimately into an image for the printed page.
(On photographing the actress six weeks before her death.) 
R. Crumb
[Cartoonist, b. 1943, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, lives in Sauve, France.]
I use photos a lot for drawing people and personalities, but they’re almost never photos that I’ve taken.
Andy Warhol
[Artist, b. 1928, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, d. 1987, New York.]
During this period [1960s] I took thousands of Polaroids of genitals. Whenever somebody came up to the Factory, no matter how straight-looking he was, I’d ask him to take his pants off so I could photograph his cock and balls... Personally, I loved porno and I bought lots of it all the time—the really dirty, exciting stuff. All you had to do was figure out what turned you on, and then just buy the dirty magazines and movie prints that are right for you, the way you’d go for the right pills or right cans of food.
Jeanloup Sieff
[Photographer, b. 1930, Paris, d. 2001, Paris.]
All aspects of photography interest me and I feel for the female body the same curiosity and the same love as for a landscape, a face or anything else which interests me. In any case, the nude is a form of landscape. There are no reasons for my photographs, nor any rules; all depends on the mood of the moment, on the mood of the model.
Lillian Bassman
[Photographer and painter, b. 1917, Brooklyn, New York, d. 2012, New York.]
It was sexually a very different thing when [the models] worked with men. They felt a charge... I caught them when they were relaxed, natural, and I spent a lot of time talking to them about their husbands, their lovers, their babies.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
[Writer and poet, b. 1929, Kaufbeuren, Germany, lives in Munich.]
The reality in which a camera turns up is always “posed,” e.g., the moon landing.
Nobuyoshi Araki
[Photographer, b. 1940, Tokyo, lives in Tokyo.]
Basically, I have never been interested in tying up the body of a model. What I was aiming at was the female heart. That was what I wanted to lay in chains. In the course of time, if I can put it this way, the models have tied themselves up, have bound themselves to me... I work using my entire bodily presence. I reproduce in my photos the space and the time between my models and myself.
Ruth Bernhard
[Photographer, b. 1905, Berlin, d. 2006, San Francisco.]
Light is my inspiration, my paint and brush. It is as vital as the model herself. Profoundly significant, it caresses the essential superlative curves and lines. Light I acknowledge as the energy upon which all life on this planet depends.
