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.
Edward Weston
[Photographer, b. 1886, Highland Park, Illinois, d. 1958, Wildcat Hill, California.]
To see the
Thing itself is essential: the quintessence revealed direct without the fog of impressionism... This then: to photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be
more than a rock. Significant presentation—not interpretation.
Brassaï (Gyula Halász)
[Photographer, b. 1889, Brassó, Transylvania, Hungary (now Romania), d. 1984, Eze, Alpes-Maritimes, France.]
Surreality lies within ourselves, in objects that have become banal because we no longer see them, in the
normality of the normal.
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.
Paolo Roversi
[Photographer, b. 1947, Ravenna, Italy, lives in Paris.]
Photography goes beyond the limits of reality and illusion. It brushes up against another life, another dimension, revealing not only what is there but what is not there.
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.
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?
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.
