Charles Baudelaire
[Writer, b. 1821, Paris, d. 1867, Paris.]
Our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze on its trivial image on a scrap of metal.
Tod Papageorge
[Photographer, b. 1940, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, lives in New Haven, Connecticut.]
I believe that the (distorting) “mirror” which is photography holds an intrinsic, even elemental, relation to writing.
Victor Burgin
[Artist and writer, b. 1941, Sheffield, England, lives in London.]
The signifying system of photography, like that of classical painting, at once depicts a scene and
the gaze of the spectator, an object
and a viewing subject.
Bill Gates
[Businessman, b. 1955, Seattle, Washington, lives in Medina, Washington.]
If you’re a guest [at my $113 million house], you’ll be able to call up on screens throughout the house almost any image you like—presidential portraits, reproductions of High Renaissance paintings, pictures of sunsets, airplanes, skiers in the Andes, a rare French stamp, the Beatles in 1965.
Lawrence Alloway
[Writer, curator, and critic, b. 1927, London, d. 1990, New York.]
If “a print is the widow of the stone,” to quote Robert Rauschenberg, then a photograph is the twin of an event.
Emmet Gowin
[Photographer, b. 1941, Danville, Virginia, lives in Princeton, New Jersey.]
[From 1966 to 1970] I was becoming alive to certain essential qualities in family photographs. Above all I admired what the camera made. The whole person was presented to the camera. There was no interference, or so it seemed. And sometimes the frame cut through the world with a surprise. There could be no doubt that the picture belonged more to the world of things and facts than to the photographer.
Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.
Pete Turner
[Photographer, b. 1934, Albany, New York, d. 2017, Long Island, New York.]
A photographer’s work is given shape and style by his personal vision. It is not simply technique, but the way he looks at life and the world around him.
