Paul Almasy
[Photojournalist, b. 1906, Budapest, Hungary, d. 2003, Paris, France.]
When I took photographs I never crouched down like a cat about to pounce on its prey. I never attacked with my camera.
Cindy Sherman
[Artist, b. 1954, Glen Ridge, New Jersey, lives in New York.]
The way I see it, as soon as I make a piece I’ve lost control of it.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
Once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of “posing,” I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image.
Siegfried Kracauer
[Media critic and sociologist, b. 1889, Frankfurt, Germany, d. 1966, New York.]
A shudder runs through the viewer of old photographs. For they make visible not the knowledge of the original but the spatial configuration of a moment; what appears in the photograph is not the person but the sum of what can be subtracted from him or her.
Sherrie Levine
[Artist, b. 1947, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
Instead of taking photographs of trees or nudes, I take photographs of photographs. I choose pictures that manifest the desire that nature and culture provide us with a sense of order and meaning. I appropriate these images to express my own simultaneous longing for the passion of engagement and the sublimity of aloofness. I hope that in my photographs of photographs an uneasy peace will be made between my attraction to the ideals these pictures exemplify and my desire to have no ideas or fetters whatsoever. It is my aspiration that my photographs, which contain their own contradiction, would represent the best of both worlds.
Dennis Grady
[lives in South Pomfret, Vermont.]
Display of the captive before the camera lens, the condition Crazy Horse so ardently avoided, quickly became a ritual of power. The U.S. Cavalry photographically documented hundreds of captive Indians along their forced marches to penal colony reservations, and such images are commonplace in histories of the West.
W. Eugene Smith
[Photographer, b. 1918, Wichita, Kansas, d. 1978, Tucson, Arizona.]
I try to take what voice I have and I give it to those who don’t have one at all.
Laurie Simmons
[Photographer, b. 1949, Long Island, New York, lives in New York.]
I was aware that people thought a certain type of photo work was either stealing, borrowing, copying or dumb.
