Philippe Halsman
[Photographer, b. 1906, Riga, Latvia, d. 1979, New York.]
Herein lies the main objective of portraiture and also its main difficulty. The photographer probes for the innermost. The lens sees only the surface... .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
