Luigi Ghirri
[Photographer, b. 1943, Scandiano, Italy, d. 1992, Reggio Emilia, Italy.]
I have always felt that photography is a language for seeing and not for transforming, hiding, or modifying reality.
Josef Koudelka
[Photographer, b. 1938, Biskovice, Moravia, Czechoslovakia, lives in Paris.]
I never stay in one country more than three months. Why? Because I was interested in seeing, and if I stay longer I become blind.
Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
Leaving aside the mysteries and the inequities of human talent, brains, taste, and reputations, the matter of art in photography may come down to this: it is the capture and projection of the delights of seeing; it is the defining of observation full and felt.
Bernard-Henri Lévy
[Writer and critic, b. 1948, Béni Saf, Algeria, lives in St-Paul-de-Vence, France.]
No one wants to see; no one wants to hear. We have to force them to see it, then. There has to be a terrorism of the gaze.
W. Eugene Smith
[Photographer, b. 1918, Wichita, Kansas, d. 1978, Tucson, Arizona.]
It’s not a matter of looking, it’s a matter of seeing.
(Quoted by photographer Edouard Boubat)
Theodore Roethke
[Poet, b. 1908, Saginaw, Michigan, d. 1963, Bainbridge Island, Washington.]
I wish I could find an event that meant as much as simple seeing.
Franz Kafka
[Writer, b. 1883, Prague, d. 1924, Prague.]
Photography concentrates one’s eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can’t catch that even with the sharpest lens. One has to grope for it by feeling.
Wim Wenders
[Artist and filmmaker, b. 1945, Düsseldorf, lives in Berlin.]
I think seeing happens partly through the eyes, but not entirely.
