Thomas Struth
[Photographer, b. 1954, Geldern, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf.]
[When] I am taking a photograph, I am conscious that I am constructing images rather than taking snapshots. Since I do not take rapid photographs it is in this respect like a painting which takes a long time where you are very aware of what you are doing in the process. Exposure is only the final act of making the image as a photograph.
André Derain
[Artist, b. 1880, Chatou, France, d. 1954, Chambourcy, France.]
It was the era of photography. This may have influenced us, and played a part in our reaction against anything resembling a snapshot of life.
(On the year 1905)
Louis Aragon
[Artist, poet, and writer, b. 1897, Neuilly, France, d. 1982, Paris.]
Today crowds are returning to art by way of photography. With the passionate movements of children at play. With the poses of men caught unawares in their sleep. With the unconscious twitches of people strolling by.
(1936)
John Szarkowski
[Curator, critic, historian, and photographer, b. 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, d. 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]
[Snapshots were] pure and unadulterated photographs, and sometimes they hinted at the existence of visual truths that had escaped all other systems of detection.
Tod Papageorge
[Photographer, b. 1940, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, lives in New Haven, Connecticut.]
All the failed pictures you’ve ever made, all of the other photographs you’ve ever loved, even songs and lines from poems walk with you, insinuating themselves into your decisions about what you’ll make your photographs of, and how you’ll shape them as pictures. The process, if anything, is intuitive rather than the product of planning—although the fact that very few people have been able to produce this kind of work at a high level also suggests how difficult it is. In other words,
intuitive may not be an adequate word for describing the stew of wildness, dogged work and hard thought that goes into producing this kind of [street] photography.
David Hockney
[Artist, b. 1937, Bradford, England, lives in Bridlington, Yorkshire; London; and Los Angeles.]
Any photographer will tell you that the one cardinal rule of photography is that when you pick up the camera and look at things through it, you are very, very deeply conscious of edges. It is the edges that make the composition in a photograph and it is what you leave there that will enable you to see things in the middle. The amateur photographer is the person who is not aware of edges—the casual snapper just points the camera at something without noticing the composition that’s going to result. But the composition is only made by the edges.
Annette Kuhn
[Writer and theorist, lives in Lancaster, England.]
Family photographs are about memory and memories: that is, they are about stories of a past, shared (both stories and past) by a group of people that in the moment of sharing produces itself as a family.
Leon Golub
[Artist, b. 1922, Chicago, Illinois, d. 2004, New York.]
The freeze of a photographic gesture, the fix of an action, how an arm twists, how a smile gets momentarily stabilized or exaggerated—to try to get some of this is important... The photofix inflects the almost literal shaping of a figure, changes of movement or potential movement, and a sense of occurrence or event.
