John Divola
[Photographer, b. 1949, Los Angeles, lives in Los Angeles.]
I want things to be dumb and obvious and flat-footed, but to address the most ambitious possible iconography.
Wynn Bullock
[Photographer, b. 1902, Chicago, Illinois, d. 1975, Monterey, California.]
In a photograph, if I am able to evoke not alone a feeling of the reality of the surface physical world but also a feeling of the reality of existence that lies mysteriously and invisibly beneath its surface, I feel I have succeeded.
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.
Shimon Attie
[Photographer, b. 1957, Los Angeles, lives in New York.]
I think of my work as a kind of peeling back of the wallpaper of today to reveal the histories buried underneath.
Paolo Roversi
[Photographer, b. 1947, Ravenna, Italy, lives in Paris.]
Photography goes beyond the limits of reality and illusion. It brushes up against another life, another dimension, revealing not only what is there but what is not there.
Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
One should photograph objects, not only for what they are but for what else they are.
Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
If you read what, say, Weston was writing in the 1920s he talked about an industrial medium, reflective surfaces, contemporary subject matter—it’s a straighter line to [Ed] Ruscha’s
26 Gas Stations than it would ever be to Ansel Adam’s pictures of Yosemite and their kitschy calendar sensibility.
Susan Meiselas
[Photographer, b. 1948, Baltimore, Maryland, lives in New York.]
We know photographers make frames, but we deeply believe they can also create frameworks.
