Auguste Rodin
[Artist, b. 1840, Paris, France, d. 1917, Paris.]
I believe that photography can create great works of art, but hitherto it has been extraordinarily bourgeois and babbling.
(1908) 
Stephen Shore
[Photographer, b. 1947, New York, lives in New York.]
I went on to Flickr and it was just thousands of pieces of shit, and I just couldn’t believe it. And it’s just all conventional, it’s all cliches, it’s just one visual convention after another. Andy Grundberg
[Critic, curator, and educator, lives in Washington, D.C.]
There is no place in the postmodern world for a belief in the authenticity of experience, in the sanctity of the individual artist’s vision, in genius or originality. What postmodern art finally tells us is that things have been used up, that we are at the end of the line, that we are all prisoners of what we see. Clearly these are disconcerting and radical ideas, and it takes no great imagination to see that photography, as a nearly indiscriminate producer of images, is in large part responsible for them. Man Ray (Emanuel Radnitsky)
[Artist, b. 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1976, Paris.]
A certain amount of contempt for the material employed to express an idea is indispensable to the purest realization of the idea. Gore Vidal
[Writer, b. 1925, West Point, New York, lives in Ravello, Italy and Los Angeles.]
For half a century photography has been the “art form” of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due? To the designer of the camera? To the finger on the button? To the law of averages? Garry Winogrand
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, d. 1984, Tijuana, Mexico.]
You know why your pictures are no fucking good? Because they don’t describe the chaos of life. (Quoted by Philip-Lorca DiCorcia) Man Ray (Emanuel Radnitsky)
[Artist, b. 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1976, Paris.]
Cut out the eye from a photograph of one who has been loved but is seen no more.Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and regulate the weight to suit the tempo desired.
Keep going to the limit of endurance.
With a hammer well-aimed, try to destroy the whole at a single blow.
(1932, describing “Object To Be Destroyed,” made using a metronome and the photographed eye of artist, lover and collaborator Lee Miller who left him.)
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
[Writer, b. 1835, Hannibal, Missouri, d. 1910, Redding, Connecticut.]
... No photograph ever was good, yet, of anybody—hunger and thirst and utter wretchedness overtake the outlaw who invented it! It transforms into desperadoes the weakest of men; depicts sinless innocence upon the pictured faces of ruffians; gives the wise man the stupid leer of a fool, and the fool an expression of more than earthly wisdom.