Larry Sultan
[Photographer, b. 1946, Brooklyn, New York, d. 2009, Greenbrae, California.]
What’s important to me is that [photographs] have the appearance of being documents of what goes on. I like the illusion of veracity, that they look like life rather than movie stills. I don’t want them to look fabricated.
Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
I find a howling error in composition, because something is in the wrong place, and I leave it there. God arranged that; I wouldn’t touch it.
Pete Turner
[Photographer, b. 1934, Albany, New York, d. 2017, Long Island, New York.]
What have I done wrong? Nothing, I think. I am steadily surprised that there are so many photographers that reject manipulating reality, as if that was wrong. Change reality! If you don't find it, invent it!
Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
“Manufactured” or staged photography does not concern me. And if I make a judgment, it can only be on a psychological or sociological level. There are those who take photographs arranged beforehand and those who go out to discover the image and seize it. For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which—in visual terms—questions and decides simultaneously.
Cindy Sherman
[Artist, b. 1954, Glen Ridge, New Jersey, lives in New York.]
Truthfully, I’m a little sick of these pictures [the Untitled Film Stills]—it’s hard for me to get excited about them anymore. It’s funny to see some of them now. Throughout my life, I’ve tried to keep looking different, so my hair has been all different colors, all lengths and styles. As a result, a lot of these characters look like me in the periods of my life since I shot the Film Stills... Occasionally I’ve felt that as I’ve gotten older I’ve come to look more like some of them. It’s kind of scary—I was always trying to look like older women.
Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
Photographers are always cast as spectators. They’re always walking down the street responding to something they see on the street. They never make things happen themselves. Well, what I’m doing is really creating my own private world and making my own thing happen. I’m not relying on accidental events.
Wright Morris
[Writer and photographer, b. 1910, Central City, Nebraska, d. 1998, Mill Valley, California.]
I prefer a taken to a made photograph.
Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]
Invention in photography is so laborious as to be in most instances perverse.
