Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
The photographer, the artist, “takes” a picture: symbolically he lifts an object or that composition... [He] has rendered his object in some way transcendent and... in each instance his vision has penetrating validity.
Thomas Mann
[Writer, b. 1875, Lübeck, Germany, d. 1955, Zurich, Switzerland.]
The process of decay was forestalled by the powers of the light-ray, the flesh in which he walked disintegrated, annihilated, dissolved in vacant mist, and there within it was the finely turned skeleton of his own hand, the seal ring he had inherited from his grandfather hanging loose and black on the joint of his ring-finger—a hard, material object with which man adorns the body that is fated to melt away beneath it, when it passes on to another flesh that can wear it yet a little while.
William Eggleston
[Photographer, b. 1939, Memphis, Tennessee, lives in Memphis.]
I am at war with the obvious.
Brassaï (Gyula Halász)
[Photographer, b. 1889, Brassó, Transylvania, Hungary (now Romania), d. 1984, Eze, Alpes-Maritimes, France.]
The ‘Surrealism’ of my images was just reality itself, but made Fantastic through vision.
Robert Rauschenberg
[Artist, b. 1925, Port Arthur, Texas, d. 2008, Captiva Island, Florida.]
My fascination with images open 24 hrs. is based on the complex interlocking if disparate facts heated pool that have no respect for grammar. The form then Denver 39 is second hand to nothing. The work then has a chance to electric service become its own cliché. Luggage. This is the inevitable fate fair ground of any inanimate object freightways by this I mean anything that does not have inconsistency as a possibility built in...
A.D. Coleman
[Critic and writer, b. 1943, New York, lives in New York.]
What a photograph shows us is how a particular thing could be seen, or could be made to look—at a specific moment, in a specific context, by a specific photographer employing specific tools.
David Hockney
[Artist, b. 1937, Bradford, England, lives in Bridlington, Yorkshire; London; and Los Angeles.]
I’ve always said that the only thing a photograph is good at capturing faithfully is another flat surface.
John Berger
[Writer and critic, b. 1926, London, d. 2017, Paris.]
A radial system has to be constructed around the photograph so that it may be seen in terms which are simultaneously personal, political, economic, dramatic, everyday and historic.
