John Loengard
[Photographer, editor, and critic, b. 1934, New York, lives in New York.]
The world doesn’t happen in moments. The camera points at the world and the shutter opens and closes and turns the three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional image and the image is the reality you’re dealing with. The picture and the moment are synonymous and can never be repeated.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
Once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of “posing,” I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image.
Helmut Gernsheim
[Photographer, collector, and photohistorian, b. 1913, Munich, Germany, d. 1995, Lugano, Switzerland.]
Neither camera, nor lens, nor film determine the quality of pictures; it is the visual perception of the man behind the mechanism which brings them to life. Art contains the allied ideas of making and begetting, of being master in one’s craft and of being able to create. Without these properties no art exists and no photographic art can come into being.
Edward Weston
[Photographer, b. 1886, Highland Park, Illinois, d. 1958, Wildcat Hill, California.]
Photography is not at all seeing in the sense that the eyes see. Our vision is binocular, it is in a continuous state of flux, while the camera captures but a single isolated condition of the moment. Besides, we use lenses of various focal lengths to purposely exaggerate actual seeing, we “overcome” color for the same reason. In printing we carry on our willful distortion of fact. This is all legitimate procedure: but it is not seeing literally, it is seeing with intention, with reason.
Walter Benjamin
[Philosopher, critic, and theorist, b. 1892, Berlin, d. 1940, Port Bou, France.]
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
Sam Abell
[Photographer, b. 1945, Sylvania, Ohio, lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.]
It matters little how much equipment we use; it matters much that we be masters of all we do use.
Walter Benjamin
[Philosopher, critic, and theorist, b. 1892, Berlin, d. 1940, Port Bou, France.]
Evidently, a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye—if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man.
Richard Nixon
[Politician, b. 1913, Yorba Linda, California, d. 1994, New York.]
A camera can misquote or misinterpret a man. An unconscious, unintentional upturning of the lips can appear in a picture as a smile at a given moment. On the other hand, too serious an expression could create an expression of fear and concern which also would be most unfortunate.
