Emmet Gowin
[Photographer, b. 1941, Danville, Virginia, lives in Princeton, New Jersey.]

 I am pessimistic about a picture’s power to be the emissary of just one thing. What I hope is that the picture says, “Here I am, this is what I am like,” and the person seeing the picture says in return, “You know a lot but you don’t know half of what I know.” 

Thomas Ruff
[Photographer, b. 1958, Zell, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf, Germany.]

 I think that historically photographs may have been made in a naive and honest way, when photographers believed in the “pencil of nature” and recording what was in front of the camera. But photography quickly came to be used in a prejudicial way, losing its innocence and consequently its ability to communicate. 

Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]

 Photographs may be taken—but we are also taken in by them. 

Germaine Krull
[Photographer, b. 1897, Wilda, East Prussia, Germany (now Poland), d. 1985, Wetzlar, Germany.]

 The true photographer is the witness of the everyday; he reports. That his eye does not always focus on what he sees three feet above the ground is natural. But that he focuses consistently on the ground, on today’s ground, on this morning’s ground, or on the ground of this day so beautiful that he forgets what day it is. The world. The world of his time. 

The Dalai Lama (Lhamo Dhondrub)
[Spiritual leader, b. 1935, Taktser, Tibet, lives in exile.]

 I know the earth is round by relying on the words of someone who has seen it and proved it with photographs... You have to rely on a person who has already had this kind of experience and has no reason to tell lies. (Explaining the Buddhist concept of extremely hidden phenomena.) 

Roger Ballen
[Photographer, b. 1950, New York, lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.]

 [Photography] tells you that every second in time is different from every other second. You want people to understand that the image in front of them has something to do with the truth, and it can never be repeated. 

William Henry Fox Talbot
[Mathematician and pioneer of photography, b. 1800, Melbury, Dorset, England, d. 1877, Lacock Abbey, England.]

 The plates of the present work are impressed by the agency of Light alone, without any aid whatsoever from the artists’ pencil. (Epigraph, 1844, The Pencil of Nature, the first photographic book)  
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