Roger Ballen
[Photographer, b. 1950, New York, lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.]
When you push the shutter and take a photo you are a photographer, but are you an artist?
James Joyce
[Writer, b. 1882, Rathgar, Ireland, d. 1941, Zurich, Switzerland.]
He dwelt, being a bit of an artist in his spare time, on the female form in general developmentally because, as it so happened, no later than that afternoon he had seen those Grecian statues, 1450 perfectly developed as works of art, in the National Museum. Marble could give the original, shoulders, back, all the symmetry, all the rest... Whereas no photo could because it simply wasn’t art in a word.
Paul Theroux
[Writer, b. 1941, Medford, Massachusetts, lives in Cape Cod, Massachusetts and Haleiwa, Hawaii.]
Tonight, I knew despair. Photography wasn’t an art, it was a craft, like making baskets. Error, the essential wrinkle in the fiber of art, was inexcusable in a craft.
Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]
Henry James proposed asking of art three modest and appropriate questions: What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing?
Chris Burden
[Artist, b. 1946, Boston, Massachusetts, d. 2015, Los Angeles.]
It’s about trying to frame something. And draw attention to it and say, “Here’s the beauty in this. I’m going to put a frame around it, and I think this is beautiful.” That’s what artists do. It’s really a pointing activity.
Jerry Uelsmann
[Photographer, b. 1934, Detroit, Michigan, lives in Gainesville, Florida.]
The goal of the artist is not to resolve life’s mysteries, but to deepen them.
Clement Greenberg
[Critic, b. 1909, New York, d. 1994, New York.]
...there is about him and some of his disciples too much art with a capital A, and too many swans in his park are only geese.
(1942, on Alfred Stieglitz)
John Tagg
[Writer, theorist, and photohistorian, b. 1949, North Shields, England, lives in Ithica, New York.]
The history of photography stands in relation to the history of Art as a history of writing would to the history of Literature.
