Arthur Koestler
[Writer, b. 1905, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1983, London, England.]
The “innocent eye” is a fiction, based on the absurd notion that what we perceive in the present can be isolated in the mind from the influence of past experience There is no perception of “pure form” but meaning seeps in, and settles on the image.
Arthur Tress
[Photographer, b. 1940, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Cambria, California.]
In my old age I no longer see the difference between documentary and staged.
(2012, age 71)
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.
Robert Frank
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1924, Zürich, Switzerland, lives in Mabou, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, and New York.]
The truth is somewhere between the documentary and the fictional, and that is what I try to show. What is real one moment has become imaginary the next. You believe what you see now, and the next second you don’t anymore.
David Hockney
[Artist, b. 1937, Bradford, England, lives in Bridlington, Yorkshire; London; and Los Angeles.]
Photography hankers after the condition of the neutral observer. But there can be no such things as a neutral observer. For something to be seen, it must be looked at by somebody, and any true and real depiction must be an account of the experience of that looking.
Janet Malcolm
[Writer, b. 1934, Prague, Czechoslovakia, lives in New York.]
Are pictures there for anyone to “take”? Or are they made by the photographer?
Jean François Millet
[Artist, b. 1814, Gruchy, France, d. 1875, Barbizon, France.]
A photograph is analogous to a plaster cast taken from life, which is always inferior to a good statue.
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.
