Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
The best part of us is not what we see, it’s what we feel. We are what we feel. We are not what we look at .... We’re not our eyeballs, we’re our mind. People believe their eyeballs and they’re totally wrong... That’s why I consider most photographs extremely boring—just like Muzak, inoffensive, charming, another waterfall, another sunset. This time, colors have been added to protect the innocent. It’s just boring. But that whole arena of one’s experience—grief, loneliness—how do you photograph lust? I mean, how do you deal with these things? This is what you are, not what you see. It’s all sitting up here. I could do all my work sitting in my room. I don’t have to go anywhere.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau
[Writer and theorist, b. 1947, New York, lives in Santa Barbara, California.]
The teaching of photography tends to be cordoned off from what goes on in the rest of the art department. So while young painters are reading art magazines and often as not following to some degree developments in film, performance or video, photography students are reading photography magazines, disputing the merits of documentary mode over self expression, or resurrecting onto the fourth generation an exhausted formalism that can no longer generate either heat or light.
Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
[The subway portraits were] a rebellion against studio portraiture.... I was angry. It was partly angry protest—not social, but aesthetic—against posed portraiture.
Alfred Eisenstaedt
[Photographer, b. 1898, Dirschau, West Prussia (now Tczew, Poland), d. 1995, New York.]
I will be remembered when I’m in heaven. People won’t remember my name, but they will know the photographer who did that picture of that nurse being kissed by the sailor at the end of World War II. Everybody remembers that.
Josef Albers
[Artist, b. 1888, Bottrop, Germany, d. 1976, New Haven, Connecticut.]
I suppose some of you have seen the advertisement of commercial photo dealers saying ‘You push the button and we do the rest’. This promotes a taking of pictures with the least care possible. Such a way of looking at photography, I believe, is of the lowest level possible and should not be our way of approaching and understanding photography.
(1943)
Annie Leibovitz
[Photographer, b. 1949, Westbury, Connecticut, lives in New York.]
I don’t mind doing something obvious. I’m not looking for the ultimate image, the ultimate essence of someone. The chances of that happening are far and few between.
Marcel Proust
[Writer, b. 1871, Auteuil, Paris, d. 1922, Paris.]
She would have liked me to have in my room photographs of ancient buildings or of beautiful places. But at the moment of buying them, and for all that the subject of the picture had an aesthetic value, she would find that vulgarity and utility had too prominent a part in them, through the mechanical nature of their reproduction through photography.
Edouard Boubat
[Photographer, b. 1923, Paris, France, d. 1999, Paris.]
All my photographs are about meetings and about
coups de foudre—love at first sight. To do that type of photography, one must wipe the canvas clean to prepare for chance encounters, be open and aware to such moments, otherwise it becomes a cliché—already seen and expected.
