Gerhard Richter
[Artist, b. 1932, Dresden, lives in Düsseldorf.]

 Throwaway snapshots come closest to achieving the state of pure picture. 

Aleksander Rodchenko
[Artist, designer, architect, b. 1891, St. Petersburg, d. 1956, Moscow.]

 Don’t try to capture a man in one synthetic portrait, but rather in lots of snapshots taken at different times and in different circumstances! 

R. Crumb
[Cartoonist, b. 1943, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, lives in Sauve, France.]

 They were just snapshots, nothing special, nothing particularly artistic. They were used for utility purposes.
(On photographs of mundane streetscapes he had “Stanley Something-or-other” take in Sacramento in 1988 to serve as backgrounds to his cartoons. “People don’t draw it, all this crap, people don’t focus attention on it because it’s ugly, it’s bleak, it’s depressing... But, this is the world we live in; I wanted my work to reflect that, the background reality of urban life.”) 

Tod Papageorge
[Photographer, b. 1940, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, lives in New Haven, Connecticut.]

 Photographing in the street with a Leica doesn’t have much to do with planning. You walk out the door and—bang!—you’re part of the great urban cavalcade. But unlike everyone else, you’re carrying an amazing little machine that, joined with a lot of effort, can pull poetry out of a walk downtown. 

Joel Meyerowitz
[Photographer, b. 1938, New York, lives in New York.]

 We all experience it. Those moments when we gasp and say, “Oh, look at that.” Maybe it’s nothing more than the way a shadow glides across a face, but in that split second, when you realize something truly remarkable is happening and disappearing right in front of you, if you can pass a camera before your eye, you’ll tear a piece of time out of the whole, and in a breath, rescue it and give it new meaning. 

Vilém Flusser
[Writer and philosopher, b. 1920, Prague, Czechoslovakia, d. 1991, Prague.]

 Both those taking snaps and documentary photographers... have not understood “information.” What they produce are camera memories, not information, and the better they do it, the more they prove the victory of the camera over the human being. 

Brassaï (Gyula Halász)
[Photographer, b. 1889, Brassó, Transylvania, Hungary (now Romania), d. 1984, Eze, Alpes-Maritimes, France.]

 I don’t like snapshots. I like to seize hold of things, and the form is very important for this... . Only through form can the image enter into our memory. It’s like the aerodynamics of a car, don’t you see? For me, form is the only criterion of a good photograph. One doesn’t forget such a photograph and one wants to see it again. 

Sam Abell
[Photographer, b. 1945, Sylvania, Ohio, lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.]

 Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment—this very moment—to stay. 
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