Lucas Samaras
[Artist, b. 1936, Kastoria, Greece, lives in New York.]

 I have wanted to photographically explore my body for years and I was going to have a professional photographer do it. But I have never been able to work well with others, and I was not going to go to a photography school and learn photography. Polaroid came in handy. 

Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]

 Thinking should be done beforehand and afterwards—never while actually taking a photograph. 

Stephen Shore
[Photographer, b. 1947, New York, lives in New York.]

 I think most people have experienced walking down the street and for a few minutes, everything looks brighter or more vivid, or space and time feels more tangible; things seem more real. I imagine that it’s quite possible that the quality of mind can imprint itself on a picture… 

Jerry Uelsmann
[Photographer, b. 1934, Detroit, Michigan, lives in Gainesville, Florida.]

 I have my own attitudes to work with, my own ritual, my game of involvement. Images create other images. I cannot be asked to be something other than what I am, but I enjoy mind-prodding and mind-stretching. 

John Muir
[Self-described "Poetico-trampo-geologist-botanist and ornithologist-naturalist etc.", b. 1838, Dunbar, Scotland, d. 1914, Los Angeles.]

 See how willingly Nature poses herself upon photographers’ plates. No earthly chemicals are so sensitive as those of the human soul. 

Sigmund Freud
[Neurologist, psychoanalyst, and thinker, b. 1856, Freiberg, Moravia, Austrian Empire (now Príbor, Czechoslovakia), d. 1939, London, England.]

 We should picture the instrument that carries our mental functioning as resembling a compound microscope or photographic apparatus. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne
[Writer, b. 1804, Salem, Massachusetts, d. 1864, Plymouth, New Hampshire.]

 While we give it credit only for depicting the merest surface, [the daguerreotype] actually brings out the secret character with a truth that no painter would even venture upon, even if he could detect it. 

Jock Sturges
[Photographer, b. 1947, New York, lives in San Francisco.]

 My hope is that the work is in some way counter-pinup. A pinup asks you to suspend interest in who the person is and occupy yourself entirely with looking at the body and fantasizing about what you could do with that body, completely ignoring how the person might feel about it. 
quotes 105-112 of 115
first page previous page page 14 of 15 next page last page
display quotes