Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
Photographers show you what a sunset looks like, they show you what a moonrise over Hernandez looks like, they show you women’s breasts or empty car lots, but they don’t play with your mind. I’m not saying all photographers should play with your mind, but it’s an option they don’t exercise. I think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know.
Horst Faas
[Photojournalist, b. 1933, Berlin, Germany, d. 2012, Munich, Germany.]
To get the best picture of a captured prisoner, you have to get him just as he is captured. The expression he wears then is lost forever... The human mechanism is remarkably recuperative. A half hour later, the expressions are gone, the faces have changed. The mother with the dead baby in her arms does not look griefstruck anymore, no matter what she feels.
Donald McCullin
[Photographer, b. 1935, Finsbury Park, London, lives in Somerset, England.]
The camera was a key to open up my life. It was like opening a huge window to the world. It gave me education, it gave me hope, it gave me travel, and in the end, after giving me all those things, it started taking things away from me. It took my mind away from me, it took things back from me. You don’t own those things in the beginning. You don’t own yourself in the beginning, you’re just dumped on this earth and you have to stand up and try to walk and try to get through it.
Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
The best part of us is not what we see, it’s what we feel. We are what we feel. We are not what we look at .... We’re not our eyeballs, we’re our mind. People believe their eyeballs and they’re totally wrong... That’s why I consider most photographs extremely boring—just like Muzak, inoffensive, charming, another waterfall, another sunset. This time, colors have been added to protect the innocent. It’s just boring. But that whole arena of one’s experience—grief, loneliness—how do you photograph lust? I mean, how do you deal with these things? This is what you are, not what you see. It’s all sitting up here. I could do all my work sitting in my room. I don’t have to go anywhere.
Sophie Calle
[Artist, b. 1953, Paris, lives in Paris and New York.]
I met a photographer who agreed to give me a few lessons; in exchange, I had to pose naked for him.
Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
Photography to me is a matter of thinking rather than looking, it’s revelation, not description.
Pipilotti Rist
[Artist, b. 1962, Reinthal, Switzerland, lives in Zurich and Los Angeles.]
Women are less interested in watching two people having sex than in understanding how and what these people are feeling when they are having sex. If you kiss someone, you want to know what the other person is feeling. So I want to find pictures that express what the other feels.
Nan Goldin
[Photographer, b. 1953, Washington, D.C., lives in New York and Paris.]
For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It’s a way of touching somebody—it’s a caress.... I think that you can actually give people access to their own soul.
