Jeff Wall
[Photographer, b. 1946, Vancouver, Canada, lives in Vancouver.]

 Every picture-constructing advantage accumulated over centuries is given up to the jittery flow of events as they unfold. The rectangle of the viewfinder and the speed of the shutter, photography’s “window of equipment,” is all that remains of the great craft-complex of composition. 

Robert Polidori
[Photographer, b. 1951, Montréal, Canada, lives in New York.]

 I would say that the emblematic photographic image is a picture from inside a room looking out. I think this defines photography. It’s the metaphor for the notion of first sight. What one saw first. 

Gregory Crewdson
[Photographer, b. 1962, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New Haven Connecticut.]

 All pictures are autobiographical, yet they’re telling us everything and nothing about the photographer. 

Rineke Dijkstra
[Photographer, b. 1959, Sittard, The Netherlands, lives in Amsterdam.]

 I felt that the beach portraits were all self-portraits. That moment of unease, that attempt to find a pose, it was all about me. 

Frank Horvat
[Photographer, b. 1928, Abbazia, Italy, now Opatija, Croatia, lives in Paris.]

 By trying many different approaches, you may slowly reach the point where you say more about yourself than about the objects or the landscapes or the people you photograph—and this is where photography really interests me. 

Christian Boltanski
[Artist, b. 1944, Paris, lives in Paris.]

 The more you work, the less you exist. I believe (at least, I used to believe, because I no longer think this is entirely true) that the artist is like someone carrying a mirror in which everyone can look and recognize themselves, so that the person who carries the mirror ends up being nothing. 

Peter Bunnell
[Writer and photo historian, b. 1937, Poughkeepsie, New York, lives in Princeton, New Jersey.]

 The nineteenth-century way of looking at the photograph was as a mirror for the memory, and at that time the photographs almost looked like mirrors, with their polished metallic surfaces. 

Bruce Davidson
[Photographer, b. 1933, Oak Park, Illinois, lives in New York.]

 All my photographs are portraits—self-portraits, because you can’t photograph someone without reflecting/echoing, like a bat sending out a signal that comes back to you. You get not only a picture of who you’re photographing, but you get a picture of yourself at the same time. 
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