John Szarkowski
[Curator, critic, historian, and photographer, b. 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, d. 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]
I am not especially interested in anonymous photography, or avant-garde photography, or in straight, crooked, or any other subspecific category; I am interested in the entire, indivisible hairy beast—because in the real world, where photographs are made, these subspecies, or races, interbreed shamelessly and continually.
(2006) 
Paul Graham
[Photographer, b. 1956, Stafford, England, lives in New York.]
Why is everyone addicted to prepackaged spectacular moments, as if that’s all that’s worth photographing?
Clement Greenberg
[Critic, b. 1909, New York, d. 1994, New York.]
...there is about him and some of his disciples too much art with a capital A, and too many swans in his park are only geese.
(1942, on Alfred Stieglitz)
Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
I don’t think we need [photography recording a real present] at all, any more; we already know, to the point of ennui, what the world looks like in photographs.
Kate Moss
[Model, b. 1974, Croydon, England, lives in St Johns Wood, England.]
Once I was walking from The Mercer Hotel in New York down the street, and this woman paparazzo who was following me fell over a fire hydrant and her whole tooth went through her lip. I leant over her, saying, “Are you all right?” and she was still taking pictures. I was, “You know what? You are sick in the head.”
Larry Clark
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1943, Tulsa, Oklahoma, lives in New York.]
[Eugene Smith] was always writing these diatribes about truth, and how he wanted to tell the truth, the truth, the truth. It was a real rebel position. It was kind of like a teenager’s position: why can’t things be like they should be? Why can’t I do what I want? I latched on to that philosophy. One day I snapped, hey, you know, I know a story that no one’s ever told, never seen, and I’ve lived it. It’s my own story and my friends’ story.
Charles Baudelaire
[Writer, b. 1821, Paris, d. 1867, Paris.]
In the domain of painting and statuary, the present-day credo of the worldly wise, especially in France, is this: ... “I believe that art is, and can only be, the exact reproduction of nature...” An avenging God has heard the prayers of this multitude; Daguerre was his messiah.
Marshall McLuhan
[Writer and theorist, b. 1911, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, d. 1980, Toronto, Canada.]
The movie stars and matinee idols are put into the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They can be bought and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes.
