Robbert Flick
[Photographer, b. 1939, Amersfoort, Holland, lives in Los Angeles, California.]
Once you take a picture, you frame something; the moment you frame it, you exclude things.
George Rodger
[Photojournalist, b. 1908, Hale, Cheshire, England, d. 1995, Smarden, Kent, England.]
When I discovered that I could look at the horror of Belsen—4,000 dead and starving lying around—and think only of a nice photographic composition, I knew something had happened to me and it had to stop.
Lisette Model
[Photographer, b. 1906, Vienna, Austria, d. 1983, New York.]
[The snapshooter’s] pictures have an apparent disorder and imperfection, which is exactly their appeal and their style. The picture isn’t straight. It isn’t done well. It isn’t composed. It isn’t thought out. And out of this imbalance, and out of this not knowing, and out of this real innocence toward the medium comes an enormous vitality and expression of life.
Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
I don’t know what good composition is... Sometimes for me composition has to do with a certain brightness or a certain coming to restness and other times it has to do with funny mistakes. There’s a kind of rightness and wrongness and sometimes I like rightness and sometimes I like wrongness.
Dennis Oppenheim
[Artist, b. 1938, Electric City, Washington, d. 2011, New York.]
The photograph gives constant reference to the rectangle. This forces any idea into the confines of pictorial illusionism.
Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
When you see a picture, you don’t see outside the frame.
Berenice Abbott
[Photographer, writer, teacher, b. 1898, Springfield, Ohio, d. 1991, Monson, Maine.]
[Composition is] as closely tied up with the body of the picture as veins and muscles are articulated with the human body.
John Szarkowski
[Curator, critic, historian, and photographer, b. 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, d. 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]
Pure photography is a system of picture-making that describes more or less faithfully what might be seen through a rectangular frame from a particular vantage point at a given moment.
