Janet Malcolm
[Writer, b. 1934, Prague, Czechoslovakia, lives in New York.]
Photography went modernist not, as has been supposed, when it began to imitate modern abstract art but when it began to study snapshots.
Joel Meyerowitz
[Photographer, b. 1938, New York, lives in New York.]
On the street each successive wave brings a whole new cast of characters, You take wave after wave, you bathe in it. There is something exciting about being in the crowd, in all that chance and change—its tough out there—but if you can keep paying attention something will reveal itself—just a split second—and then there’s a crazy cockeyed picture.
Walter Benjamin
[Philosopher, critic, and theorist, b. 1892, Berlin, d. 1940, Port Bou, France.]
The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject.
Allan Sekula
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1951, Erie, Pennsylvania, d. 2013, Los Angeles.]
Nothing could be more natural than... a man pulling a snapshot from his wallet and saying, “This is my dog.”
Elinor Carcucci
[Photographer, b. 1971, Jerusalem, lives in New York.]
When I started taking pictures, I was worried about staged work. I was trying to make everything like a snapshot, very spontaneous, because I wanted it to be true, to be honest. I then realized I’m never spontaneous because I’m photographing myself, so I’m always posing, always aware, always staged.
Salman Rushdie
[Writer, b. 1947, Bombay (now Mumbai), lives in New York.]
A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second, or one sixteenth, or one one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth. Snap your fingers; a snapshot’s faster.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
Reality offers us such wealth that we must cut some of it out on the spot, simplify. The question is, do we always cut out what we should? While we’re working, we must be conscious of what we’re doing. Sometimes we have the feeling that we've taken a great photo, and yet we continue to unfold. We must avoid however, snapping away, shooting quickly and without thought, overloading ourselves with unnecessary images that clutter our memory and diminish the clarity of the whole.
Hiroshi Sugimoto
[Photographer, b. 1948, Tokyo, lives in New York.]
I didn’t want to be criticized for taking low-quality photographs, so I tried to reach the best, highest quality of photography and then to combine this with a conceptual art practice. But thinking back, that was the wrong decision [laughs]. Developing a low-quality aesthetic is a sign of serious fine art—I still see this.
