Oscar Rejlander
[Photographer, b. 1817, Sweden, d. 1875, London.]
[Photography] is fair, open, and aboveboard. There is no sham about it—no pretensions to anything that is not desirable. And the world wouldn’t be without it, in all its branches—including the one I most practice, art-studies and details from the life. Though to me this branch of the art is unprofitable, yet it gives me pleasure. I live in it, if not by it.
(1863) 
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
[Artist, photographer, designer, and teacher, b. 1895, Bacsbarsod, Hungary, d. 1946, Chicago, Illinois.]
... no intention exists of making photography into an art in the old sense. We definitely have to go back to the deeper responsibility of the photographer who accomplishes a work with the photographic means which could not be accomplished the in the same way with other means. Therefore the existence of photography today exists less in serving individual artistic expression but rather much more in it pedagogical function.
Chuck Close
[Artist, b. 1940, Monroe, Washington, lives in New York.]
... I think that while photography is the easiest medium in which to be competent it is probably the hardest one in which to develop an idiosyncratic personal vision. It is the hardest medium in which to separate yourself from all those other people who are doing reasonably good stuff and to find a personal voice, your own vision, and to make something that is truly, memorably yours and not someone else’s. A recognized signature style of photography is an incredibly difficult thing to achieve... Photography is not an easy medium. It is, finally, perhaps the hardest of them all.
Umberto Eco
[Writer, semiotician, and philosopher, b. 1932, Alessandria, Piedmont, Italy, d. 2016, Milan.]
If photography is to be likened to perception, this is not because the former is a “natural” process but because the latter is also coded.
John Divola
[Photographer, b. 1949, Los Angeles, lives in Los Angeles.]
In all my work there’s this notion of the melancholic. You can make a photograph about the sublime, but you can’t make the sublime itself.
Georges Didi-Huberman
[Writer and thinker, b. 1953, Saint-Etienne, France, lives in Paris.]
The image is not a closed field of knowledge; it is a whirling, centrifugal field. It is not a “field of knowledge” like any other; it is a movement demanding all the anthropological aspects of being and time.
Jeff Wall
[Photographer, b. 1946, Vancouver, Canada, lives in Vancouver.]
A picture is something that makes invisible its before and after.
Peter Brook
[Theater director and producer, b. 1925, London, lives in London.]
One view of photography is that it is a zen-like act which captures reality with its pants down—so that the vital click shows the anatomy bare. In this, the photographer is invisible but essential. A computer releasing the shutter would always miss the special moment that the human sensibility can register. For this work, the photographer’s instinct is his aid, his personality a hindrance.
