Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
The state of mind of a photographer while creating is a blank... For those who would equate “blank” with a kind of static emptiness, I must explain that this is a special kind of blank. It is a very active state of mind really, a very receptive state of mind, ready at an instant to grasp an image, yet with no image pre-formed in it at any time. We should note that the lack of a pre-formed pattern or preconceived idea of how anything ought to look is essential to this blank condition. Such a state of mind is not unlike a sheet of film itself—seemingly inert, yet so sensitive that a fraction of a second’s exposure conceives a life in it.
Gordon Parks
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1912, Fort Scott, Kansas, d. 2006, New York.]
The photographer begins to feel big and bloated and so big he can't walk through one of these doors because he gets a good byline; he gets notices all over the world and so forth; but they’re really—the important people are the people he photographs. They are what make him.
Kansuke Yamagata
[Photographer and poet, b. 1914, Nagoya, Japan, d. 1987, Nagoya.]
Three-dimensional objects are transformed into flat pictures. This easy transformation traps photographers.... We shouldn’t overestimate the mechanism of a lens. There is no way that reality can be copied.
Carrie Mae Weems
[Artist, b. 1953, Portland, Oregon, lives in Syracuse, New York.]
Grabbing snatching blink and you be gone.
Gilles Peress
[Photographer, b. 1946, Neuilly, France, lives in New York.]
... an image has several authors: there is yourself; there is the camera (because I think that photography through each camera speaks in a different way); there is reality, because reality speaks very forcefully through photography; and then there is the viewer, which is a person who looks at the image, makes his own interpretation of what’s happening.
Marius de Zayas
[Artist, b. 1880, Veracruz, Mexico, d. 1961, Greenwich, Connecticut.]
The photographer—the true photographer—is he who has become able, through a state of perfect consciousness, to possess such a clear view of things as to enable him to understand and feel the beauty of the reality of Form.
(1913)
Helmut Newton
[Photographer, b. 1920, Berlin, d. 2004, Los Angeles.]
Genius and taste don’t go together.
Jerry Uelsmann
[Photographer, b. 1934, Detroit, Michigan, lives in Gainesville, Florida.]
I have gradually confused photography and life and as a result of this I believe I am able to work out of myself at an almost precognitive level.
