Peter Bunnell
[Writer and photo historian, b. 1937, Poughkeepsie, New York, lives in Princeton, New Jersey.]
…in a photograph the most specific details are the source of the most general conclusions.
Pieter Hugo
[Photographer, b. 1976, Johannesburg, South Africa, lives in Cape Town.]
In the process of working in any medium, at some stage, you become aware of its limitations. For me it was realizing that photography could only describe the surface of things. It’s symbolic. It can’t do much more than that.
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.
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.
Philip-Lorca diCorcia
[Artist, b. 1953, Hartford, Connecticut, lives in New York.]
Photography... unites the obvious and the unconscious at the level of the limimal—the border between what we see and what we suspect.
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.
Larry Fink
[Photographer, b. 1941, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania.]
[Photography is] the idea of the transformative merger between you and the person you are seeing, that you somehow try to enter their form, their skin, their mass, their muscle, and potentially, possibly, their soul.
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.
