Dave Hickey
[Writer and critic, b. 1939, rural Texas, lives in Los Angeles.]
In images,… beauty was the agency that caused visual pleasure in the beholder; and any theory of images that was not grounded in the pleasure of the beholder begged the question of their efficacy and doomed itself to inconsequence.
Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]
Many have asked, pointing incredulously toward a sweep of tract homes and billboards, why picture that? The question sounds simple, but it implies a difficult issue—why open our eyes anywhere but in undamaged places like national parks?
Helmut Newton
[Photographer, b. 1920, Berlin, d. 2004, Los Angeles.]
...what I try to do is a good bad picture. I work it out very carefully, and then I do something that looks as if it went wrong.
Josef Albers
[Artist, b. 1888, Bottrop, Germany, d. 1976, New Haven, Connecticut.]
Just as the unmusical ear is not competent to judge music, so it is likewise with pictures, whether they are paintings, drawings or photos. Only a sensitive and trained eye gives us the right to judge…
André Kertész
[Photographer, b. 1894, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1985, New York.]
My youth in Hungary is full of sweet and warm memories. I have kept the memory alive in my photographs. I am a sentimentalist—born that way, happy that way.
Charis Wilson
[Model, b. 1914, San Francisco, d. 2009, Santa Cruz, California.]
I knew I really didn’t look that good, and that Edward [Weston] had glorified me, but it was a very pleasant thing to be glorified and I couldn’t wait to go back for more.
William Klein
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, lives in Paris.]
I spent six months in New York at that time [1954] and thought I had a book. So I went to publishers here, in New York, and got nowhere. Most of the people who looked at the photographs looked at the work and said “What kind of book is this? You make New York look like a slum.” I said, “Yeah, New York
is a slum.” “What kind of New York are you showing me, everything black and awful?” I said, “No, you live on Fifth Avenue and your office is on Madison. You’ve never been to the Bronx, you’ve never been to Queens or Flatbush. This is the real New York.”
Lucy Lippard
[Critic and writer, b. 1936, New York, lives in Galisteo, New Mexico.]
Given the lack of public skills in reading photographs, given that photographic content is sometimes buried in beauty, contemporary landscape photographers are often condemned to making pretty pictures. Dramatic clouds and sifting light can overwhelm more mundane information. Yet who can resist beautiful landscape pictures of one kind or another? Not I.
