Robert Smithson
[Artist, b. 1938, Rutherford, New Jersey, d. 1973, Amarillo, Texas.]
Noon-day sunshine cinema-ized the site, turning the bridge and the river into an over-exposed picture. Photographing it with my Instamatic 400 was like photographing a photograph. The sun became a monstrous light-bulb that projected a detached series of “stills” through my Instamatic into my eye.
Sophie Ristelhueber
[Photographer, b. 1949, Paris, lives in Paris.]
I have these obsessions that I do not completely understand, with the deep mark, with the ruptured surface, with scars and traces, traces that human beings are leaving on the earth. It is not a comment on the environment... it is metaphysical.
Clarence John Laughlin
[Photographer, b. 1905, Lake Charles, Louisiana, d. 1985, New Orleans, Louisiana.]
The physical object, to me, is merely a steppingstone to an inner world where the object, with the help of subconscious drives and focused perceptions, becomes transmuted into a symbol whose life is beyond the life of the objects we know and whose meaning is a
truly human meaning. By dealing with the object in this way, the creative photographer sets free the
human contents of objects; and imparts humanity to the inhuman world around him.
Timothy O'Sullivan
[Photographer, b. 1840, Ireland or New York (disputed), d. 1882, Staten Island, New York.]
Place and people are made familiar to us by means of the camera in the hands of skillful operators, who, vying with each other in the excellence of their productions, avail themselves of every opportunity to visit interesting points, and to take care to lose no good chance to scour the country in search of new fields for photographic labor.
Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]
Photographers who can teach us to love even vacant lots will do so out of the same sense of wholeness that inspired the wilderness photographers of the last twenty-five years (the deepest joy possible in wilderness is, most would agree, the mysterious realization of one’s alliance with it). Beauty, Coleridge wrote, is based in “the unity of the manifold, the coalescence of the diverse.” In this large sense, beautiful photographs of contemporary America will lead us out into daily life by giving us a new understanding of and tolerance for what previously seemed only anarchic and threatening.
Mario Giacomelli
[Photographer, b. 1925, Senigallia, Italy, d. 2000, Senigallia.]
To be sure the landscape can’t run away, and yet I always fear that it may. [Sometimes] I must set up my tripod, so I worry that the landscape may disappear the next second and I don't stop keeping an eye on it while I get prepared. Then, when pressing the shutter, I hold my breath. These moments are the greatest joys in my life, as if I were undressing the most beautiful woman in the world—that is, if she will allow herself be undressed. If the photo is a success, it means that she was willing. If not, it has been a lovely dream.
Thomas Struth
[Photographer, b. 1954, Geldern, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf.]
The image of an empty landscape accommodates the medium of photography in so far as it always involves the present, despite being historically referential.
Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]
At their best the [nineteenth-century] photographers accepted limitation and faced space as the antitheatrical puzzle it is—a stage without a center. The resulting photos have an element of almost banality about them, but it is exactly this acknowledgement of the plain surface to things that helps legitimize the photographer's difficult claim that the landscape is coherent.
