Jean Baudrillard
[Writer and theorist, b. 1929, Reims, France, d. 2007, Paris.]
Photography is obsessive, temperamental, ecstatic and narcissistic in character. It is a solitary activity. The photographic image is discontinuous, selective, unpredictable and irreparable, like the state of things at any given moment. Any touching up, second thoughts or staging assumes an abominably aesthetic character.
Bill Jay
[Photographer, writer, and curator, b. 1940, Maidenhead, England, d. 2009, Samara, Costa Rica.]
Making a photograph is as difficult as finding a particularly frisky cat in a dark room. Making a great photograph is as chancy as trying to catch a frisky cat in a black room in which there is no cat.
Jerry Uelsmann
[Photographer, b. 1934, Detroit, Michigan, lives in Gainesville, Florida.]
I have gradually confused photography and life and as a result of this I believe I am able to work out of myself at an almost precognitive level.
E.B. White
[Writer, b. 1899, Mount Vernon, New York, d. 1985, North Brooklin, Maine.]
Of course, it may be that the arts of writing and photography are antithetical. The hope and aim of a word-handler is that he may communicate a thought or an impression to his reader without the reader’s realizing that he has been dragged through a series of hazardous or grotesque syntactical situations. In photography the goal seems to be to prove beyond a doubt that the cameraman, in his great moment of creation, was either hanging by his heels from the rafters or was wedged under the floor with his lens in a knothole.
Aaron Siskind
[Photographer, b. 1903, New York, d. 1991, Providence, Rhode Island.]
There are two forces operating in my work: pleasure and terror.
Italo Calvino
[Writer, b. 1923, Santiago de la Vegas, Cuba, d. 1985, Siena, Italy.]
Whatever person you decide to photograph, or whatever thing, you must go on photographing it always, exclusively, at every hour of the day and night.
Larry Clark
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1943, Tulsa, Oklahoma, lives in New York.]
since I became a photographer I always wanted to turn back the year. always wished I had a camera when I was a boy. fucking in the backseat, gangbanging with the pretty girls all the other girls in the neighborhood hated.
Jan Dibbets
[Artist, b. 1941, Weert, The Netherlands, lives in Amsterdam.]
I start by thinking I’m going to make use of all possibilities without troubling any longer about problems when something starts to be art. I don’t make the ETERNAL work of ART, I only give visual information.
