Peter Henry Emerson
[Writer and photographer, b. 1856, LaPalma, Cuba, d. 1936, Falmouth, Cornwall, England.]
“A photograph,” it has been said, “shows the art of nature rather that the art of the artist.” This is mere nonsense, as the same remark might by applied equally to all the fine arts. Nature does not jump into the camera, focus itself, expose itself, develop itself, and print itself.
(1889) 
Peter Galassi
[Curator and writer, b. 1951, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]
Photography was not a bastard left by science on the doorstep of art, but a legitimate child of the Western pictorial tradition.
Joel-Peter Witkin
[Photographer, b. 1939, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.]
Artists are the people among us who realize creation didn’t stop on the sixth day.
Emmet Gowin
[Photographer, b. 1941, Danville, Virginia, lives in Princeton, New Jersey.]
Twentieth-century art has allowed me to see things in a cryptic way. I love the butterfly’s wings, which disappear when folded and when open leave this brilliant, intense pronouncement of nature, “Here I am.”
Dan Graham
[Artist, critic, and theorist, b. 1942, Urbana, Illinois, lives in New York.]
A [spatial, temporal] work had only to be exhibited in a gallery and then written about and
reproduced as a photograph in an art magazine. Then this record of the no longer extant installation, along with accretions of information after the fact, became the basis for its fame, and to a large extent its economic value.
Ed Ruscha
[Artist, b. 1937, Omaha, Nebraska, lives in Los Angeles.]
My pictures are not that interesting, nor the subject matter. They are simply a collection of “facts;” my book is more like a collection of “Ready-mades.”
Paul Klee
[Artist, b. 1879, Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, d. 1940, Muralto-Locarno, Switzerland.]
The artist of today is more than an improved camera, he is more complex, richer, and wider. He is a creature on the earth and a creature within the whole, that is, a creature on a star among stars.
Paul Outerbridge
[Photographer, b. 1896, New York, d. 1958, Laguna Beach, California.]
I had a growing feeling that most of the best art of the world in painting and sculpture had been done, and that this newest form [photography] was more related to the progress and tempo of modern science of the eye.
