Martine Franck
[Photographer, b. 1938, Antwerp, Belgium, d. 2012, Paris.]
A photograph is not necessarily a lie, but it isn’t the truth either. It’s more like a fleeting, subjective impression.
Aaron Siskind
[Photographer, b. 1903, New York, d. 1991, Providence, Rhode Island.]
I want to bring my pictures to the ideal of music. Like music, it means everything, it says everything, but it is objective.
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)
Anders Petersen
[Photographer, b. 1944, Solna, Sweden, lives in Stockholm.]
I can’t describe reality; at the most, I can try to capture things that seem to be valid, the way I see them.
Tom Wolfe
[Writer, b. 1930, Richmond, Virginia, d. 2018, 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.
Thomas Ruff
[Photographer, b. 1958, Zell, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf, Germany.]
You cannot explain the whole world in one photograph. Photography pretends. You can see everything that’s in front of the camera, but there’s always something beside it.
W. Eugene Smith
[Photographer, b. 1918, Wichita, Kansas, d. 1978, Tucson, Arizona.]
The journalistic photographer can have no other than a personal approach; and it is impossible for him to be completely objective. Honest—yes. Objective—no.
Annie Leibovitz
[Photographer, b. 1949, Westbury, Connecticut, lives in New York.]
I no longer believe that there is such a thing as objectivity. Everyone has a point of view. Some people call it style, but what we’re really talking about here is the guts of a photograph. When you trust your point of view, that’s when you start taking pictures.
