Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
Photography seems to be the most literary of the graphic arts. It will have—on occasion and in effect—qualities of eloquence, wit, grace, and economy; style, of course; structure and coherence; paradox and play and oxymoron. If photography tends to be literary, conversely some writers are noticeably photographic from time to time—for instance James, and Joyce, and particularly Nabokov.
Andreas Feininger
[Photographer, b. 1906, Paris, France, d. 1999, New York.]
Once a photographer is convinced that the camera can lie and that, strictly speaking, the vast majority of photographs are “camera lies,” inasmuch as they tell only part of a story or tell it in distorted form, half the battle is won. Once he has conceded that photography is not a naturalistic medium of rendition and that striving for “naturalism” in a photograph is futile, he can turn his attention to using a camera to make more effective pictures.
Eve Arnold
[Photographer, b. 1913, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 2011, London.]
If the photographer is interested in the people in front of his lens, and if he is compassionate, it’s already a lot. The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.
Mario Sorrenti
[Photographer, b. 1971, Naples, Italy, lives in New York.]
I’ve had moments where I’ve felt like I was on another planet because I saw something beautiful. To me, taking pictures is being alive.
Victor Burgin
[Artist and writer, b. 1941, Sheffield, England, lives in London.]
Counter to the nineteenth-century aesthetics which still dominates most teaching of photography, and most writings on photography, work in semiotics has shown that a photograph is not to be reduced to ‘pure form’, nor ‘window on the world’, nor is it a gangway to the presence of an author. A fact of primary social importance is that the photograph is a
place of work, a structured and structuring space within which the reader deploys, and is deployed by, what codes he or she is familiar with in order to
make sense.
Jerry Uelsmann
[Photographer, b. 1934, Detroit, Michigan, lives in Gainesville, Florida.]
The out-of-focus image is a photographic phenomenon. The negative image is a photographic phenomenon. The multiple exposure is a natural aspect of photography. A lot of these phenomena have been more effectively exploited by people in other media but they belong naturally to photography and in my opinion should be very much a part of every photographer’s vocabulary.
Emmet Gowin
[Photographer, b. 1941, Danville, Virginia, lives in Princeton, New Jersey.]
Photography is such an important instrument in the education of our feelings and perception because of its duality. Photography represents the world we know, and suggests a world beyond what we can see. Creativity is the gap between perception and knowledge.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
All photographs are
memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.
