John Updike
[Writer, b. 1932, Shillington, Pennsylvania, d. 2009, Boston, Massachusetts.]
The photograph see for us; it sees faster and sharper than the eye, more steadily and spaciously, but our world is what it sees. In this sense all photography is journalistic...
Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Camera and eye are together a time machine with which the mind and human being can do the same kind of violence to time and space as dreams.
Ayn Rand (Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum)
[Writer, b. 1905, Saint Petersburg, Russia, d. 1982, New York.]
An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes.
Frank Meadow Sutcliffe
[Photographer, b. 1852, Headingley, Leeds, England, d. 1941, Whitby, England.]
The person who looks at a photograph as a complete picture, unable to say anything about anything except the facts which existed at the moment of exposure, does not see very far.
Kyoichi Sawada
[Photographer, b. 1936, Aomori City, Aomori Prefecture, Japan, d. 1970, Cambodia.]
A photograph is viewed by many but it also sees those who view it. A photo is extraordinary. Each carries its own fate.
Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]
One does not for long wrestle a view camera in the wind and heat and cold just to illustrate a philosophy. The thing that keeps you scrambling over the rocks, risking snakes, and swatting at the flies is the view. It is only your enjoyment of and commitment to what you see, not to what you rationally understand, that balances the otherwise absurd investment of labor.
George, Gilbert
[Artist, b. 1942, Devon, England, lives in London.]
[Artist, b. 1943, Dolomites, Italy, lives in London.]
Surface vision and sensation have been adopted by Gilbert & George as their sole mode of perception... Governed now by a new form of awareness, sensation itself has none of its former easy-going quality: on occasion it can be downright painful. In a word, it consists in the power to visualize.
Eliot Porter
[Photographer, b. 1901, Winnetka, Illinois, d. 1990, Santa Fe, New Mexico.]
You learn to see by practice. It’s just like playing tennis, you get better the more you play. The more you look around at things, the more you see. The more you photograph, the more you realize what can be photographed and what can’t be photographed. You just have to keep doing it.
