Sherrie Levine
[Artist, b. 1947, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
Maybe I should see things as they really are and not as I want them to be.
Allan Sekula
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1951, Erie, Pennsylvania, d. 2013, Los Angeles.]
The only “objective” truth that photographs offer is the assertion that somebody or something... was somewhere and took a picture. Everything else, everything beyond the imprinting of a trace, is up for grabs.
Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
The objectivity of the camera, used wrongly, is the very devil.
James McNeill Whistler
[Artist, b. 1834, Lowell, Massachusetts, d. 1903, London.]
The imitator is a poor kind of creature. If the man who paints only the face, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer.
William Klein
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, lives in Paris.]
Anybody who pretends to be objective isn’t realistic.
Henry Holmes Smith
[Artist and teacher, b. 1909, Bloomington, Illinois, d. 1986, San Rafael, California.]
The intensely felt subjective image is always the reason for making a first rate picture.
Tom Wolfe
[Writer, b. 1931, Richmond, Virginia, lives in New York.]
It was the unspoken curse of the medium, which went: “Photography is not really creative.” Naturally no painter would be so gauche as to say publicly that photography was not an art form. Nevertheless, there was an unuttered axiom: “Painters create, photographers select.” Not all the enlightened lip service in the world could change that feeling. The condescension with which the most insignificant painter could look down upon an Ansel Adams, a Steichen, or a Stieglitz was absolutely breathtaking. If sneers gave off heat, Alfred Stieglitz himself would have ended up about the size and shape of a smoked oyster.
Brassaï (Gyula Halász)
[Photographer, b. 1889, Brassó, Transylvania, Hungary (now Romania), d. 1984, Eze, Alpes-Maritimes, France.]
I had myself echoed [Peter Henry] Emerson’s view that photography was not an art form, but I had done so without the slightest regret… It is something better than art! It rules out subjectivity, the artist’s arbitrariness; through photography it is at last possible to attain divine, total objectivity.
