Tod Papageorge
[Photographer, b. 1940, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, lives in New Haven, Connecticut.]
Cameras are like dogs, but dumb, and toward quarry, even more faithful. They point, they render, and defy the photographer who hopes.
Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
I’ve got incredible power in my closet. Not power to do harm—just the feeling that I’ve captured people who have since died and people who will never look that way again. The camera is cruel, so I try to be as good as I can to make things even.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
The camera doesn’t rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate—all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment.
Andy Warhol
[Artist, b. 1928, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, d. 1987, New York.]
I just [take pictures] because the camera is something to carry around in my pocket.
Tristan Tzara (Sami Rosenstock)
[Writer and artist, b. 1896, Moineti, Bacu, Romania, d. 1963, Paris.]
But let’s speak of art for a moment. Yes, art. I know a gentleman who makes excellent portraits. This gentleman is a camera.
Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
The camera is first a means of self-discovery and a means of self-growth. The artist has one thing to say—himself.
Dorothea Lange
[Photographer, b. 1895, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1965, San Francisco.]
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
One really doesn’t associate a machine—a little box with glass in it—with the personal imprint of the operator, but it is there, and it’s a kind of magic, inexplicable quality.
