Garry Winogrand
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, d. 1984, Tijuana, Mexico.]
I don’t know if all the women in the photographs are beautiful, but I do know the women are beautiful in the photographs.
Brian Eno
[Musician, composer, artist, b. 1948, Woodbridge, England, lives in Suffolk, England.]
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature... The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
Tallulah Bankhead
[Actress, b. 1902, Huntsville, Alabama, d. 1968, New York.]
They used to photograph Shirley Temple through gauze. They should photograph me through linoleum.
Marc Riboud
[Photographer, b. 1923, St.-Genis-Laval, France, d. 2016, Paris.]
I have always been more sensitive to the beauty of the world than to violence and monsters.
Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
Color is vulgar, beauty is unimportant, and nature is trivial.
Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Animal living is photographed full tide with barely a moment of lyricism, none of beauty, and tragedy only a match struck on the seat of the pants…. Actually Klein did not photograph a city; he matched with cheap sensational photography the vulgarity of life in all its ugliness.
(1957, On William Klein’s book New York
.)
Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
Recently I did a picture—I’ve had this experience before—and I made rough prints of a number of them. There was something wrong in all of them. I felt I’d sort of missed it and I figured I’d go back. But there was one that was just totally peculiar. It was a terrible dodo of a picture. It looks to me a little as if the lady’s husband took it. It’s terribly head-on and sort of ugly and there’s something terrific about it. I’ve gotten to like it better and better and now I’m secretly sort of nutty about it.
Imogen Cunningham
[Photographer, b. 1883, Portland, d. 1976, San Francisco.]
I was invited to photograph Hollywood. They asked me what I would like to photograph. I said, Ugly men.
