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…
Emile Zola
[Writer, b. 1840, Paris, France, d. 1902, Paris.]
In my view you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it.
Emmet Gowin
[Photographer, b. 1941, Danville, Virginia, lives in Princeton, New Jersey.]
Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn’t attending to. My photographs are intended to represent something you don’t see.
Douglas McCulloh
[Photographer, b. 1959, Los Angeles, lives in Los Angeles.]
We live within an ever-deepening strata of visual iconography, sharing shifting signifiers up and down the layers of our lives. Eventually, we mistake abundance for vision. We become blind to our own blindness.
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.
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.
William Blake
[Poet and artist, b. 1757, London, d. 1827, London.]
Man is led to believe a lie, when he sees with, not through the eye.
(Aphorism adopted by Edward Weston)
Paul Valéry
[Writer and poet, b. 1871, Sète, France, d. 1945, Paris.]
Thanks to photography, the eye grew accustomed to anticipate what it should see and to see it; and it learned not to see nonexistent things which, hitherto, it had seen so clearly.
