Larry Fink
[Photographer, b. 1941, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania.]
The pictures are taken in the spirit of finding myself in the other or finding the other in myself.
(On his images published as Social Graces
, made mainly at museum and gallery parties and similar high-end social functions.) 
Bertolt Brecht
[Dramatist, director and poet, b. 1898, Augsburg, Germany, d. 1956, East Berlin.]
Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.
Nan Goldin
[Photographer, b. 1953, Washington, D.C., lives in New York and Paris.]
I am not a voyeur, as voyeurs photograph through closed windows and with me the window is always wide open.
Peter Galassi
[Curator and writer, b. 1951, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]
One of the great adventures of modernism began when painters closed the window of Renaissance perspective and contemplated the shuttered field of the picture plane. In theory, the medium of photography—a perfect, mechanical embodiment of perspective—would seem to have had no role to play in such an enterprise. But the photograph is a picture too, and photography’s modernist adventure might be described as a dialogue between the transparency of the open window and the impenetrable surface of the image.
Ralph Steiner
[Photographer, b. 1899, Cleveland, Ohio, d. 1986, Hanover, New Hampshire.]
By showing a picture, you’re showing an x-ray of your heart.
Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
I saw a world that was being shoved down my throat, and I thought by putting up a mirror to it I could show it to itself.
Nathan Lyons
[Photographer, writer, and curator, b. 1930, Jamaica, New York, d. 2016, Rochester, New York.]
Photography has achieved an unprecedented mirroring of the things in our culture. We have pictured so many aspects and objects of our environment in the form of photographs (motion pictures and television) that the composite of these representations has assumed the proportions and identity of an actual environment.
Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
The camera is first a means of self-discovery and a means of self-growth. The artist has one thing to say—himself.
