Edmundo Desnoes
[Writer, b. 1930, Havana, Cuba, lives in New York.]
Photography has fooled the world. There’s no more convincing fraud. Its images are nothing but the expression of the invisible man working behind the camera. They are not reality, they form part of the language of culture.
Paul Strand
[Photographer, b. 1890, New York, d. 1976, Oregeval, France.]
The thing I see is outside myself—always. I’m not trying to describe an inner state of being.
Paul Auster
[Writer, b. 1947, Newark, New Jersey, lives in Brooklyn, New York.]
You can’t see yourself. You know what you look like because of mirrors and photographs, but... your own face is invisible to you... We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.
Germaine Krull
[Photographer, b. 1897, Wilda, East Prussia, Germany (now Poland), d. 1985, Wetzlar, Germany.]
The true photographer is the witness of the everyday; he reports. That his eye does not always focus on what he sees three feet above the ground is natural. But that he focuses consistently on the ground, on today’s ground, on this morning’s ground, or on the ground of this day so beautiful that he forgets what day it is. The world. The world of his time.
Margaret Bourke-White
[Photographer, b. 1904, New York, d. 1971, Darien, Connecticut.]
Difficult as these things may be to report and to photograph, it is something we war correspondents must do, We are in a privileged and sometimes unhappy position. We see a great deal of the world. Our obligation is to pass it on to others.
Irving Penn
[Photographer, b. 1917, Plainfield, New Jersey, d. 2009, New York.]
I share with many people the feeling that there is a sweetness and constancy to light that falls into a studio from the north sky that sets it beyond any other illumination. It is a light of such penetrating clarity that even a simple object lying by chance in such a light takes on an inner glow, almost a voluptuousness.
Burke Uzzle
[Photographer, b. 1938, Raleigh, North Carolina, lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.]
A photographer’s best pictures are from deep inside him, and also some of the worst. Some photographers enjoy distinguished careers without ever taking personal photographs. Others, audaciously and arrogantly and courageously discharge their most private feelings through photography. Trouble is, sometimes it all adds up to baloney.
Wright Morris
[Writer and photographer, b. 1910, Central City, Nebraska, d. 1998, Mill Valley, California.]
[We] make images to see clearly: then we see clearly what we have made.
