Richard Avedon
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 2004, San Antonio, Texas.]
My photographs don’t go below the surface. They don’t go below anything. They’re readings of what’s on the surface. I have great faith in surfaces. A good one is full of clues.
Nikki S. Lee
[Photographer, b. 1970, Kye-Chang, Korea, lives in New York.]
What does it mean to go deeper? Taking pictures when you’re more emotional or sorrowful, or having sex? I just want to have really boring snapshots—people just standing in front of a camera taking pictures with a smile.
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.
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.
Brassaï (Gyula Halász)
[Photographer, b. 1889, Brassó, Transylvania, Hungary (now Romania), d. 1984, Eze, Alpes-Maritimes, France.]
Surreality lies within ourselves, in objects that have become banal because we no longer see them, in the
normality of the normal.
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.
Susie Linfield
[Writer and critic, New York, lives in New York.]
The best photographic portraits, like the best painted portraits, present us not with biographical information but with a soul.
Saul Leiter
[Photographer, b. 1923, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, d. 2013, New York.]
I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera.
