Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
You go to these schools, and the kids all show you gorgeous prints of water running over pebbles. I’d rather see a not-so-gorgeous mistake of a brilliant idea, an idea that maybe the kid didn’t even know how to solve technically, but who cares, because he’s talking about something incredible. It’s not the medium, it’s the message for me.
W. Eugene Smith
[Photographer, b. 1918, Wichita, Kansas, d. 1978, Tucson, Arizona.]
I think the only thing wrong with the word “documentary” is that it can give some people the idea that you can make absolutely dull pictures of the ingredients of something instead of the heart of something.
Eudora Welty
[Writer, b. 1909, Jackson, Mississippi, d. 2001, Jackson.]
Insight doesn’t happen often on the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but from within.
Dawoud Bey
[Photographer, b. 1953, Queens, New York, lives in Chicago.]
If done well, I believe the photographic representation of the human subject has the potential to be more revealing than what is revealed by the eye alone, since the human glance is usually a momentary one.
