Auguste Rodin
[Artist, b. 1840, Paris, France, d. 1917, Paris.]

 Mere exactitude, of which photography and moulage [life casting] are the lowest forms, does not inspire feelings. 

Andy Grundberg
[Critic, curator, and educator, lives in Washington, D.C.]

 Modernism required that photography cultivate the photographic—indeed, that it invent the photographic—so that its legitimacy would not be questioned. 

Sean Penn
[Actor, b. 1960, Burbank, California, lives in Los Angeles.]

 I still think photographers should be lashed out at. They should be put in a cage where you can poke them with a stick for a quarter. But not in a hostile way, just for giggles. They really are on the attack against mankind; it’s a disease. They should be helped somewhere. But I’d still like to poke them with a stick. 

Ernst Haas
[Photographer, b. 1921, Vienna, Austria, d. 1986, New York City.]

 There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are. 

Cornell Capa (Kornél Friedmann)
[Writer and photographer, b. 1918, Budapest, Hungary, d. 2008, New York.]

 The idea that any photography can’t be personal is madness! ... I see something; it goes through my eye, heart, guts; I choose the subject. What could be more personal than that? 

Aleksander Rodchenko
[Artist, designer, architect, b. 1891, St. Petersburg, d. 1956, Moscow.]

 We struggle against easel painting not because it is an aesthetic form of painting, but because it is not modern, for it does not succeed in bringing out the technical side, it is a redundant, exclusive art, and cannot be of any use to the masses. Hence we are struggling not against painting but against photography carried out as if it were an etching, a drawing, a picture in sepia or watercolor. 

Henry Peach Robinson
[Photographer, b. 1830, Ludlow, Shropshire, England, d. 1901, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England.]

 It is [the photographer’s] imperative duty to avoid the mean, the base and the ugly, and to aim to elevate his subject... and to correct the unpicturesque... A great deal can be done and very beautiful pictures made, by a mixture of the real and the artificial in a picture. (1867) 
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