Edward Steichen
[Photographer and curator, b. 1879, Luxembourg, Germany, d. 1973, West Redding, Connecticut.]
When I first became interested in photography... my idea was to have it recognized as one of the fine arts. Today I don’t give a hoot in hell about that. The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself. And that is the most complicated thing on earth and also as naïve as a tender plant.
Jeanloup Sieff
[Photographer, b. 1930, Paris, d. 2001, Paris.]
I am totally superficial, I know. But I believe superficiality can be very serious, a defense against the gravity of things, a manner of discretion.
Larry Sultan
[Photographer, b. 1946, Brooklyn, New York, d. 2009, Greenbrae, California.]
...when it comes down to making work that really sings, I don’t know if I can teach any of it. I don’t even know if I can do any of it half the time. It’s so much about failure, it’s so much about making pictures that are so utterly boring and overstated, you’re endlessly disappointed. And in that process you hopefully find something that draws you back and calls to you.
Douglas Huebler
[Photographer and artist, b. 1924, Ann Arbor, Michigan, d. 1997, Truro, Massachusetts.]
The essential quality of existence concerns where one is at any instant in time: that locates everything else. Location, as a phenomenon of space and time, has been transposed by most art forms into manifestations of visual equivalence: that is, as an experience located at the ends of the eyeballs. I am interested in transposing location directly into “present” time by eliminating things, the appearance of things, and appearance itself. The documents carry out that role using language, photographs and systems in time and location.
George, Gilbert
[Artist, b. 1942, Devon, England, lives in London.]
[Artist, b. 1943, Dolomites, Italy, lives in London.]
Surface vision and sensation have been adopted by Gilbert & George as their sole mode of perception... Governed now by a new form of awareness, sensation itself has none of its former easy-going quality: on occasion it can be downright painful. In a word, it consists in the power to visualize.
Gilles Peress
[Photographer, b. 1946, Neuilly, France, lives in New York.]
I don’t care so much anymore about “good photography,” I am gathering evidence for history.
Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
You can never capture a person in picture, never. You might get an interesting expression or gesture. I almost never research a picture subject ahead of time. I think Karsh is full of baloney. Can you imagine spending a whole week out in La Jolla with Jonas Salk soaking up his ambiance, then wind up making him look as if he’s in the studio in Ottawa with his thumb under his chin?
Robert Frank
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1924, Zürich, Switzerland, lives in Mabou, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, and New York.]
I prefer to work on the edge, not the middle of the road. I am looking for chaos.
