Nell Dorr
[Photographer, b. 1895, Cleveland, Ohio, d. 1988, Washington, Connecticut.]
Without the one thing, beauty, I think I could not endure to live. With it, I can endure all. I find it equally in joy and in sorrow. In the greatest of each, in birth and in death, I find an almost unbearable beauty...
Cecil Beaton
[Photographer, b. 1904, London, d. 1980, Broad Chalke, Wiltshire, Great Britain.]
I want to make photographs of very elegant women taking the lipstick off their teeth.
David LaChapelle
[Photographer, b. 1968, Connecticut, lives in New York.]
The two most ripped-off photographers in the past six years have been Nan Goldin and Larry Clark. These two artists took some harrowing pictures of themselves, their lovers, their fights. What some fashion photographers did was imitate these artists by getting some model and fucking up her hair and putting her in a Prada top and Gucci shoes and throwing her in a dirty apartment that’s not her own. They say these pictures are more modern and more real, but they’re fantasy presented as real. My work is fantasy presented as fantasy; I’m into escapism and beauty. I live on the Lower East Side, and once, I lived in a squat. I’ve had friends OD, so I don’t want to see someone looking strung out—I’ve been there.
Bert Stern
[Photographer, b. 1929, Brooklyn, New York, d. 2013, New York.]
She was so beautiful at that time. I didn’t say, “Pose nude.” It was more one thing leading to another: You take clothes off and off and off and off and off.
(On his June 1962 photo shoot with Marilyn Monroe.)
John Coplans
[Artist, critic, and curator, b. 1920, London, d. 2003, New York.]
I have the feeling that I’m alive, I have a body. I’m seventy years old, and generally bodies of seventy-year-old men look somewhat like mine. It’s a neglected subject matter. If I accept the cultural situation, I’m a dead man. So I’m using my body and saying, even though it’s a seventy-year-old body, I can make it extremely interesting. That keeps me alive and gives me vitality. It’s a kind of process of energizing myself by belief that the classical tradition of art that we’ve inherited from the Greeks is a load of bullshit.
Graham Nash
[Musician, photographer, and collector, b. 1942, Blackpool, Lancashire, England, lives in Encino, California.]
There really is a kind of insane beauty around us all the time. It’s just a question of learning to slow down, take a deep breath and meet the moment.
George Bataille
[Philosopher and writer, b. 1897, Billon, Puy-de-Dôme, France, d. 1962, Paris.]
It seems impossible, in fact, to judge the eye using any word other than seductive, since nothing is more attractive in the bodies of animals and men. But extreme seductiveness is probably at the boundary of horror.
Sophie Ristelhueber
[Photographer, b. 1949, Paris, lives in Paris.]
My real interest is traveling the world’s tormented places and revealing the scars and the traces on the ground. I am dedicated to the earth.
