Tina Modotti
[Photographer and political activist, b. 1896, Undine, Italy, d. 1942, Mexico City.]
I know that the materials found on the streets is rich and wonderful, but my experience is that the way I am accustomed to work, slowly planning my composition etc. is not suited for such work. By the time I have the composition or expression right, the picture is gone. I guess I want to do the impossible and therefore I do nothing.
John Szarkowski
[Curator, critic, historian, and photographer, b. 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, d. 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]
Much of the best energy of photographers during the past seventy years has been dedicated to the task of thinning out the rank growth of information that the camera impartially records if left to its own devices, in favor of pictures which have been—for lack of a better word—simpler.
(1973)
Pedro Meyer
[Photographer, b. 1935, Madrid, Spain, lives in Mexico City.]
I had no intention of waiting a week, ten days or the time necessary so that something would happen, so that I could get the “decisive moment” looked for so often by photographers... The specific “decisive moment” wasn’t to be found, it had to be created.
Georgia O'Keeffe
[Artist, b. 1887, Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, d. 1986, Santa Fe, New Mexico.]
He wanted head and hands and arms on a pillow—in many different positions. I was asked to move my hands in many different ways—also my head—and I had to turn this way and that. There were nudes that might have been of several different people—sitting—standing—even standing upon the radiator against the window—that was difficult—radiators don’t intend you to stand on top of them.
(On being photographed by Alfred Stieglitz)
Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
The photographer, the artist, “takes” a picture: symbolically he lifts an object or that composition... [He] has rendered his object in some way transcendent and... in each instance his vision has penetrating validity.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
If a photograph is to communicate its subject in all its intensity, the relationship of form must be rigorously established. Photography implies the recognition of a rhythm in the world of real things. What the eye does is to find a focus on the particular subject within the mass of reality; what the camera does is simply to register upon film the decision made by the eye. We look at and perceive a photograph as a painting, in its entirety and all in one glance... One does not add composition as though it were an afterthought superimposed on the basic subject material, since it is impossible to separate content from form. Composition must have its own inevitability about it.
Joan Didion
[Writer, b. 1934, Sacramento, California, lives in New York.]
...[t]o shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.
Luigi Ghirri
[Photographer, b. 1943, Scandiano, Italy, d. 1992, Reggio Emilia, Italy.]
…photography always implies subtraction, or a sense of something missing, something outside the frame.
