Robert Rauschenberg
[Artist, b. 1925, Port Arthur, Texas, d. 2008, Captiva Island, Florida.]
I don’t want a picture to look like something it isn’t. I want it to look like something it is.
Richard Avedon
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 2004, San Antonio, Texas.]
A portrait isn’t a fact but an opinion—an occasion rather than a truth.
Garry Winogrand
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, d. 1984, Tijuana, Mexico.]
The photograph isn’t what was photographed. It’s something else. It’s a new fact.
Paolo Roversi
[Photographer, b. 1947, Ravenna, Italy, lives in Paris.]
Photography goes beyond the limits of reality and illusion. It brushes up against another life, another dimension, revealing not only what is there but what is not there.
Ruth Bernhard
[Photographer, b. 1905, Berlin, d. 2006, San Francisco.]
What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality.
Arnold Newman
[Photographer, b. 1918, New York, d. 2006, New York.]
Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.
Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]
Artists sometimes claim that they work without thought of an audience—that they make pictures just for themselves. We are not deceived. The only reward worth that much effort is a response, and if no one pays attention, or if the artist cannot live on hope, then he or she is lost.
Andy Grundberg
[Critic, curator, and educator, lives in Washington, D.C.]
Facts cling to photographs like dust.
