Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Often while traveling with camera we arrive just as the sun slips over the
horizon of a moment, too late to expose film, only time enough to expose our
hearts.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
The image-surfeited are likely to find sunsets corny; they now look, alas, too much like photographs.
Vik Muniz
[Artist, b. 1961, Sao Paulo, Brazil, lives in New York.]
A lot of what happens in my work is at the level of recognition. The viewer is in front of something that either is an archetype or an icon, recognized to a point of exhaustion. Images of the Virgin and the baby Jesus say a lot about dress code, how wealth was distributed, how politics worked. People today can bypass the subject matter, because they know it so well. They’re able to see what’s around it.
E.M. Forster
[Writer, b. 1879, London, d. 1970, Coventry, England.]
Even a fellow with a camera has his favourite subjects, as we can see looking through the Kodak-albums of our friends. One amateur prefers the family group, another bathing scenes, another cows upon an alp, or kittens held upside down in the arms of a black-faced child. The tendency to choose one subject rather than another indicates the photographer’s temperament. Nevertheless, his passion is for photography rather than for selection, a kitten will serve when no cows are available...
Nikki S. Lee
[Photographer, b. 1970, Kye-Chang, Korea, lives in New York.]
What does it mean to go deeper? Taking pictures when you’re more emotional or sorrowful, or having sex? I just want to have really boring snapshots—people just standing in front of a camera taking pictures with a smile.
Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Photographers who come up with power never get accused of imitating anyone else even though they photograph the same broom, same street, same portraits.
Tom Wolfe
[Writer, b. 1930, Richmond, Virginia, d. 2018, New York.]
Then 1967’s Photographer of the Century made his entrance at a dead run, carrying a stroboscopic 35mm camera. He bolted into the tubercular-blue gleam of the room and hurled himself toward the floor, feet first like a baseball player going into second base. He slid ... an ectomorphic sliver... sweeping through one and all, flailing away at the film advance lever of his camera, squeezing off six, eight, ten pictures about calf level during his furious skid. Stroboscopic lights burst all around. They were like rockets.
Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
[Photography] deals with religious hypocrisy, and abortion, and homosexuality, all the buzzwords in American culture. Everything should be subject to photography, not just the polite things like moonrise and sunsets and tits and ass. I mean everything, your dreams and your nightmares and Margaret Thatcher.
