Orlan (Mireille Suzanne Francette Porte)
[Artist, b. 1947, St. Etienne, France, lives in Ivry-sur-Seine, France.]
Only a few kinds of images force you to shut your eyes: death, suffering, the opening of the body, some aspects of pornography for some people, and for others, giving birth. In this case, the eyes become black holes in which the image is absorbed willingly or unwillingly, these images are swallowed up and hit just where it hurts, without passing though the usual filters.
Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
Photography books often have titles like
The Photographer’s Eye or
The Vision of So and So or
Seeing Photographs—as if photographers didn’t have minds, only eyes.
Barbara Morgan
[Photographer, b. 1900, Buffalo, Kansas, d. 1992, North Tarrytown, New York.]
Primarily, I am after that instant of combustion, when all the energies of the spirit are wonderfully coordinated with the action of the body. How to get that onto a negative!
Shomei Tomatsu
[Photographer, b. 1930, Nagoya, Japan, d. 2012, Okinawa, Japan.]
Sometimes a photographer is a passenger, sometimes a person who stays in one place. What he watches changes constantly, but his watching never changes. He doesn’t examine like a doctor, defend like a lawyer, analyze like a scholar, support like a priest, make people laugh like a comedian, or intoxicate like a singer. He only watches. This is enough. No, this is all I can do. All a photographer can do is watch. Therefore, a photographer has to watch all the time. He must face the object and make his entire body an eye. A photographer is someone who wagers everything on seeing.
Henry Wessel
[Photographer, b. 1942, Teaneck, New Jersey, lives in San Francisco.]
I actually try and work before my mind is telling me what to do.
Susie Bright
[Writer, feminist, and activist, b. 1958, Arlington, Virginia, lives in Santa Cruz, California.]
Photographs have always been the tar baby of censors and obscenity laws. Literature can certainly (if it’s any good) conjure up the most pornographic imagination. But photographs dare to be “real.” No matter how contrived or constructed they are, there’s that damn body staring you in the face.
Stanley Cavell
[Philosopher, b. 1926, Atlanta, Georgia, lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.]
Under examination by the camera, a human body becomes for its inhabitant a field of betrayal more than a ground of communication, and the camera’s further power is manifested as it documents the individual’s self-conscious efforts to control the body each time it is conscious of the camera’s attention to it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
[Philosopher, b. 1889, Vienna, Austria, d. 1951, Cambridge, England.]
The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
