Gilles Peress
[Photographer, b. 1946, Neuilly, France, lives in New York.]

 How do you make the unseen seen? 

Francis Bacon
[Artist, b. 1909, Dublin, Ireland, d. 1992, Madrid, Spain.]

 Jesus would have been one of the best photographers that ever existed. He was always looking at the beauty of people’s souls. 

Michelangelo Antonioni
[Filmmaker, b. 1912, Ferrara, Italy, d. 2007, Rome.]

 We know that under the revealed image there is another one which is more faithful to reality, and under this one is yet another, and again another under this last one, down to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that nobody will ever see. Or perhaps, not until the decomposition of every image, of every reality. 

Ruth Bernhard
[Photographer, b. 1905, Berlin, d. 2006, San Francisco.]

 If you are not willing to see more than is visible, you won’t see anything. 

Franz Kafka
[Writer, b. 1883, Prague, d. 1924, Prague.]

 Photography concentrates one’s eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can’t catch that even with the sharpest lens. One has to grope for it by feeling. 

Richard Avedon
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 2004, San Antonio, Texas.]

 The point is that you can’t get at the thing itself, the real nature of the sitter, by stripping away the surface. The surface is all you’ve got. You can only get beyond the surface by working with the surface. All that you can do is manipulate that surface—gesture, costume, expression—radically and correctly. 

Boris Mikhailov
[Photographer, b. 1938, Kharkov, Ukraine, lives in Kharkov and Berlin.]

 When you’re open to life, it responds to you. That is what an intuitive possibility of photography is—to crawl deeper into the depths of life. 

Rosalind Krauss
[Writer, critic, and historian, b. 1941, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]

 Everything that one photographs is in fact “flattened to fit” paper, and thus under, within, permeating, every paper support, there is a body. 
quotes 9-16 of 276
first page previous page page 2 of 35 next page last page
display quotes