Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Camera and eye are together a time machine with which the mind and human being can do the same kind of violence to time and space as dreams.
O. Winston Link
[Photographer, b. 1914, Brooklyn, New York, d. 2001, South Salem, New York.]
Winston, I don’t know what I want, but I want you to go out and get it. When I see it, I’ll know if it’s what I thought I wanted.
(Quoting a photography client.)
Berenice Abbott
[Photographer, writer, teacher, b. 1898, Springfield, Ohio, d. 1991, Monson, Maine.]
Unless they do their share of growing up to their responsibilities the photographer can languish or take up knitting.
Edward Weston
[Photographer, b. 1886, Highland Park, Illinois, d. 1958, Wildcat Hill, California.]
Only with effort can the camera be forced to lie: basically it is an honest medium: so the photographer is much more likely to approach nature in a spirit of inquiry, of communion, instead of with the saucy swagger of self-dubbed “artists.”
José Saramago
[Writer, b. 1922, Azinhaga, Portugal, d. 2010, Tias, Las Palmas, Spain.]
We are finally living in Plato’s cave, if we consider how those who were imprisoned within the cave—who could do nothing but watch those shadows passing on the back wall—were convinced that those shadows were their one and only reality. I see a profound similarity to all this in the epoch we’re now living in. We no longer live simply through images: we live through images that don’t even exist, which are the result not of physical projection but of pure virtuality.
Robert Heinecken
[Photographer, b. 1931, Denver, d. 2006, Albuquerque, New Mexico.]
Many pictures turn out to be limp translations of the known world instead of vital objects which create an intrinsic world of their own. There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
The camera is a kind of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions, freeing the photographer from any responsibility toward the people photographed. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder—a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightening time.
Edvard Munch
[Artist, b. 1863, Loten, Hedmark, Norway, d. 1944, Oslo, Norway.]
The camera cannot compete with painting so long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell.
