Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]
The final strength in really great photographs is that they suggest more than just what they show literally.
Yes, photographs are only convincing if the photographer pays attention to the facts of life, but photographs have to point beyond the facts.
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.
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.
Ansel Adams
[Photographer, b. 1902, San Francisco, d. 1984, Carmel, California.]
To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces and record the qualities of nature and humanity which live or are latent in all things.
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.
Beaumont Newhall
[Photographer, writer, and historian, b. 1908, Lynn, Massachusetts, d. 1993, Santa Fe, New Mexico.]
The present challenge to the photographer is to express inner significance through outward form.
Douglas McCulloh
[Photographer, b. 1959, Los Angeles, lives in Los Angeles.]
If you scratch through the deceitful artifice of contemporary photography, you’ll find the real artifice underneath.
