Penelope Umbrico
[Photographer, b. 1957, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
I have always been more interested in how we as a culture see things than how I see in particular.
Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
One of photography’s early attractions for me was that it was – or could be made to appear to be – almost the same as ordinary vision; or at least it was the closest thing to that the arts offered. It had the illusion of being unmediated seeing, and it was that quality that I wanted to exploit…
Alphonse Bertillon
[Police officer, biometrics researcher, “inventor” of the criminal mug shot, b. 1853, Paris, d. 1914, Münsterlingen, Switzerland.]
We can only see what we are looking for and we look for what is already in our minds.
Theodore Roethke
[Poet, b. 1908, Saginaw, Michigan, d. 1963, Bainbridge Island, Washington.]
The eye, of course, is not enough. But the outer eye serves the inner eye, that’s the point.
Sherrie Levine
[Artist, b. 1947, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
Maybe I should see things as they really are and not as I want them to be.
Anaïs Nin
[Writer, b. 1903, Neuilly, France, d. 1977, Los Angeles.]
We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.
Dorothea Lange
[Photographer, b. 1895, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1965, San Francisco.]
One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.
Frederick Wiseman
[Filmmaker and Documentarian, b. 1930, Boston, Massachusetts, lives in Boston.]
The effort to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality.
