Terence Donovan
[Photographer, b. 1936, Stepney, England, d. 1996, London.]

 Don’t buy a Hasselblad unless you have a tripod and an assistant. If you drop the magazine, it tends to be embarrassing, like trying to spoon up your guacamole in Acapulco. When I see a Hampstead gynaecologist on holiday festooned with a Hasselblad and lenses and no tripod, I know he is a photographer wanker. 

Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]

 [Photography] is the most successful vehicle of modernist taste in its pop version, with its zeal for debunking the high culture of the past (focusing on shards, junk, odd stuff; excluding nothing); its conscientious courting of vulgarity; its affection for kitsch; its skill in reconciling avant-garde ambitions with the rewards of commercialism; its pseudo-radical patronizing of art as reactionary, elitist, snobbish, insincere, artificial, out of touch with the broad truths of everyday life; its transformation of art into cultural document. 

John Glenn
[Astronaut and politician, b. 1921, Cambridge, Ohio, lives in Washington D.C.]

 To hell with this. I’m going to go down to Cocoa Beach. (On being told by NASA that he couldn’t take a camera on his historic first space flight, forcing him to make a trip to a Florida drugstore where he bought the Ansco Autoset snapshot camera and two rolls of Kodak film he used on the flight.) 

Elliott Erwitt
[Photographer, b. 1928, Paris, France, lives in New York.]

 Making pictures is a very simple act. There is no great secret in photography... schools are a bunch of crap. You just need practice and application of what you’ve learned. My absolute conviction is that if you are working reasonably well the only important thing is to keep shooting... it doesn’t matter whether you are making money or not. Keep working, because as you go through the process of working things begin to happen. 

Peter Conrad
[Critic, b. 1948, Hobart, Tasmania, lives in Oxford, England.]

 The camera is a killing chamber, which speeds up the time it claims to be conserving. Like coffins exhumed and prised open, the photographs put on show what we were and what we will be again. 

Janet Malcolm
[Writer, b. 1934, Prague, Czechoslovakia, lives in New York.]

 [Richard Avedon’s] camera dwells on the horrible things that age can do to people’s faces—on the flabby flesh, the slack skin, the ugly growths, the puffy eyes, the knotted necks, the aimless wrinkles, the fearful and anxious set of the mouth, the marks left by sickness, madness, alcoholism, and irreversible disappointment. 

Anna Nicole Smith (Vicki Lynn Marshall)
[Model, b. 1967, Houston, Texas, d. 2007, Hollywood, Florida.]

 He’s comming to meet me on Sun. Cant wait!!... Please God let him love me!!... This could be it [followed by five happy faces].... Hes going to publish my pictures Im so glad I didn’t sleep with him either!... I hate for men to want sex all the time. I hate sex anyway. (1992, diary entry as she prepares for a meeting with Paul Marciano, head of Guess.) 

Brian Duffy
[Photographer, b. 1933, London, d. 2010, London.]

 Ninety-nine per cent of my work was advertising and crap. The people who were hiring me I didn’t like. Keeping a civil tongue up the rectum of a society that keeps you paid is an art which I was devoid of. I had nothing more to say in photographs. (1979, on why he quit photography) 
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