Lewis Hine
[Photographer, writer, and reformer, b. 1874, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, d. 1940, New York.]
The photograph has an added realism of its own; it has an inherent attraction not found in other forms of illustration. For this reason the average person believes implicitly that the photograph cannot falsify. Of course, you and I know that this unbounded faith in the integrity of the photograph is often rudely shaken, for, while photographs may not lie, liars may photograph. It becomes necessary, then, in our revelation of the truth, to see to it that the camera we depend on contracts no bad habits.
(1909) 
Eva Rubinstein
[Photographer, b. 1933, Buenos Aires, Argentina, lives in New York and Paris.]
That’s all the difficulty and the challenge and the battle: to look through this mechanical thing, these bits of glass and metal, at someone. And not lose the sense that this “shape” is a human being.
David Hockney
[Artist, b. 1937, Bradford, England, lives in Bridlington, Yorkshire; London; and Los Angeles.]
The camera is a medium is what I suddenly realized. It’s neither an art, a technique, a craft, nor a hobby—it's a tool. It’s an extraordinary drawing tool. It’s as if I, like most ordinary photographers, had previously been taking part in some long-established cultures in which pencils were used only for making dots—there’s an obvious sense of liberation that comes when you realize you can make lines!
Will Connell
[Photographer, b. 1898, d. 1961, Los Angeles.]
Photography is a language, a powerful modern method of talking to people; the camera is merely the tool that makes this communication possible.
Barbara Ess
[Photographer, b. 1948, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New York.]
My camera distorts and I like that—I like distortion in music too because it loosens things up.
(On her pinhole camera)
Charles Sheeler
[Artist, b. 1883, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1965, Dobbs Ferry, New York.]
When one goes back to our early photography whose mechanics was extremely simple and from our modern point of view often crude, it’s easy to see that the present immense elaboration of means isn’t very important.
(1938)
Victor Burgin
[Artist and writer, b. 1941, Sheffield, England, lives in London.]
To remain long with a single image is to risk the loss of our imaginary command of the look, to relinquish it to that absent other to whom it belongs by right—the camera. The image then no longer received our look, reassuring us of our founding centrality, it rather, as it were, avoids our gaze, confirming its allegiance to the other.
Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
I don’t think the essence of photography is it so much. The essence is done very quietly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine.
