Gilles Peress
[Photographer, b. 1946, Neuilly, France, lives in New York.]
How do you make the unseen seen?
Adam Gopnik
[Writer and critic, b. 1956, Philadelphia, lives in New York.]
Is the selfie—those newly omnipresent photos of ourselves, taken with our own little palm-fitting cameras—merely a genre of informal self-portraiture, as old as the camera and as many-sided, or is it visual crabgrass, covering over and crowding out deeper investigation of who we are?
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.
Brassaï (Gyula Halász)
[Photographer, b. 1889, Brassó, Transylvania, Hungary (now Romania), d. 1984, Eze, Alpes-Maritimes, France.]
What attracts the photographer is precisely the chance to penetrate inside phenomena, to uncover forms... He pursues them into their last refuges and surprises them at their most positive, their most material and true.
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.
Jeanloup Sieff
[Photographer, b. 1930, Paris, d. 2001, Paris.]
I am totally superficial, I know. But I believe superficiality can be very serious, a defense against the gravity of things, a manner of discretion.
Alan Trachtenberg
[Writer and critic, b. b. 1932, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, lives in Hamden, Connecticut.]
Now we distrust depths, interiors, hidden truths. Meanings lie on surfaces, artifacts of an occasion rather than truths about persons.
Jerry Uelsmann
[Photographer, b. 1934, Detroit, Michigan, lives in Gainesville, Florida.]
The goal of the artist is not to resolve life’s mysteries, but to deepen them.
