Sebastião Salgado
[Photographer, b. 1944, Aimores, Minas Gerias, Brazil, lives in Paris and Brazil.]
When you work fast, what you put in your pictures is what your brought with you—your own ideas and concepts. When you spend more time on a project, you learn to understand your subjects. There comes a time when it is not you who is taking the pictures. Something special happens between the photographer and the people he is photographing. He realizes that they are giving the pictures to him.
Richard Prince
[Artist, b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone, lives in New York.]
There was a point where I noticed that things had changed in the Marlboro ad. They got rid of the famous guy, a certain model who used to be in all the ads. They took him out and started using other people. That’s when I went after it. That’s when I stole it.... This was a famous campaign. If you’re going to steal something, you know, you go to the bank.
Steve McCurry
[Photographer, b. 1950, Newton Square, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
We photographers say that we “take” a picture, and in a certain sense, that is true. We take something from people’s lives, but in doing so we tell their story.
Chris Killip
[Photographer, b. 1946, Douglas, Isle of Man, United Kingdom, lives in Boston.]
I take what isn’t mine and I covet other people’s lives.
Charlotte Cotton
[Curator and author, b. 1981, Cotswolds, England, lives in London.]
The internet does not adhere to the inherent, necessary asymmetry of high-versus-low-art categorizations that we use in the cultural sector: in a banal sense, all photographs on the Web are orphans ready to be claimed.
Penelope Umbrico
[Photographer, b. 1957, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
…since I’m finding something going on there that is not the original intent of the images, I feel I have absolutely every right to use them.
Sheila Metzner
[Photographer, b. 1939, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New York.]
The photograph is something, in its highest form that I am giving for my effort. It is not something that I take. And then after I bring it back, develop it, print it, look at it, experience it again, I submit my experience to life. I give it back to the world it came from. Light into darkness. Darkness into light.
Jean Paul Sartre
[Writer and philosopher, b. 1905, Paris, d. 1980, Paris.]
Why, you’ve even stolen my face; you know it and I don’t!
