Richard Prince
[Artist, b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone, lives in New York.]
I don’t see any difference now between what I collect and what I make. It’s become the same. What I’m collecting will, a lot of times, end up in my work.
Wright Morris
[Writer and photographer, b. 1910, Central City, Nebraska, d. 1998, Mill Valley, California.]
I prefer a taken to a made photograph.
Eugene Richards
[Photographer, b. 1944, Dorchester, Massachusetts, lives in New York.]
I’m often uncomfortable taking pictures, especially if people are grieving, or hurt, or hungry. At such times I have to remind myself that I’m a photographer and that this is my job.
Federico Fellini
[Filmmaker, b. 1920, Rimini, Italy, d. 1993, Rome.]
There is no such thing as a good paparazzo. A good paparazzo, that’s a paparazzo who has had his camera broken. In fact, they are bandits, thieves of photography.
(Statement after photographs were published showing Jackie Onassis sunbathing nude.)
Emmet Gowin
[Photographer, b. 1941, Danville, Virginia, lives in Princeton, New Jersey.]
This is the gift of the landscape photograph, that the heart finds a place to stand.
Edmundo Desnoes
[Writer, b. 1930, Havana, Cuba, lives in New York.]
There is a kind of photography that has a refined presence in the history of images stolen from reality. It is the art photograph as a lie. It transcends fluid reality and creates a closed unity. When it achieves an aesthetic synthesis, it immediately attains static unity. Cartier-Bresson’s photographs taken in Indonesia, for example, have this paralysing effect. One is compelled to believe in the perfection of the original reality; the image is a harmonious entity in itself. “Do not change a single thing!” one feels inclined to exclaim, like a stupid tourist in any “exotic and primitive” country.
William Henry Fox Talbot
[Mathematician and pioneer of photography, b. 1800, Melbury, Dorset, England, d. 1877, Lacock Abbey, England.]
The most transitory of things, a shadow, the proverbial emblem of all that is fleeting and momentary, may be fettered by the spells of our ‘natural magic’, and may be fixed forever in the position which seemed only destined for a single instant to occupy... Such is the fact, that we may receive on paper the fleeting shadow, arrest it there and in the space of a single minute fix it there so firmly as to be no more capable of change.
(1839)
James Agee
[Writer, b. 1909, Knoxville, Tennessee, d. 1955, New York.]
It seems to me curious, not to say obscene and thoroughly terrifying, that it could occur to an association of human beings... drawn together through need and chance and for profit into a company, an organ of photojournalism, to pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings... for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings in the name of science of ‘honest journalism’.
