Paolo Roversi
[Photographer, b. 1947, Ravenna, Italy, lives in Paris.]
My life is full of pictures I didn’t take, or that I just took with my mind because I wasn’t fast enough with the camera.
Walter Benn Michaels
[Writer and critic, b. 1948, lives in Chicago.]
What a [Cindy Sherman] photograph shows is an object that has been called into the world by the existence of cameras; the pose, as pose, calls attention to this fact and criticizes the world the camera has made; the camera, then, records this critique.
Weegee (Usher Fellig)
[Photographer, b. 1899, Zlothew near Lemberg, Austrian Galicia (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), d. 1968, New York.]
I have no inhibitions, and neither has my camera.
Alexey Brodovitch
[Graphic designer and art director, b. 1898, Ogolitchi, Russia, d. 1971, Le Thor, France.]
When you look into your camera, if you see an image you have ever seen before, don’t click the shutter.
Weegee (Usher Fellig)
[Photographer, b. 1899, Zlothew near Lemberg, Austrian Galicia (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), d. 1968, New York.]
There are photographic fanatics, just as there are religious fanatics. They buy a so-called candid camera... there is no such thing: it’s the photographer who has to be candid, not the camera.
Robert Smithson
[Artist, b. 1938, Rutherford, New Jersey, d. 1973, Amarillo, Texas.]
There is something abominable about cameras, because they possess the power to invent many worlds. As an artist who has been lost in this wilderness of mechanical reproduction for many years, I do not know which world to start with. I have seen fellow artists driven to the point of frenzy by photography.
Jerry Uelsmann
[Photographer, b. 1934, Detroit, Michigan, lives in Gainesville, Florida.]
The camera is essentially a license to explore.
Lynsey Addario
[Photographer, b. 1973, Norwalk, Connecticut, lives in Islington, England.]
When I was behind a camera, it was the only place in the world I wanted to be.
