Richard Prince
[Artist, b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone, lives in New York.]
It would be strange for me to think I’m being ripped off, because that’s what I do! In those days, it was called “pirating.” Now they call it “sampling.”
Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]
Photographers are open to gifts. As the poet John Clare wrote, “I found the poems in the fields / And only wrote them down.”
Jerry Uelsmann
[Photographer, b. 1934, Detroit, Michigan, lives in Gainesville, Florida.]
Each click of the shutter becomes an emotional investment, and a part of the world becomes our visual possession.
Lewis Hine
[Photographer, writer, and reformer, b. 1874, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, d. 1940, New York.]
In the early days of my child labor activities I was an investigator with a camera attachment... but the emphasis became reversed until the camera stole the whole show.
Sally Mann
[Photographer, b. 1951, Lexington, Virginia, lives in Lexington.]
When we made these pictures, the kids knew exactly what to do to make an image work: how to look, how to project degrees of intensity or defiance or plaintive, woebegone, Dorothea Lange dejection. I didn’t pry these pictures from them—they gave them to me.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
No sophisticated sense of what photography is or can be will ever weaken the satisfactions of a picture of an unexpected event seized in mid-action by an alert photographer.
George Carlin
[Comedian and social critic, b. 1937, New York, d. 2008, Santa Monica, California.]
Although the photographer and the art thief were close friends, neither had ever taken the other’s picture.
Ernst Haas
[Photographer, b. 1921, Vienna, Austria, d. 1986, New York City.]
No one gives you freedom—you take it.