Barbara Morgan
[Photographer, b. 1900, Buffalo, Kansas, d. 1992, North Tarrytown, New York.]
Movement of contemporary life cannot be thought of without the machine. Our viewpoint is through a windshield, through reflected images on plate glass, blurred snatches through an elevator door. We watch quilted land patterns slowly shift far below our propeller blur, and the vibrating wing tip. Time is cogged, margins tightened, spirit is pressured. Pavement is a child's backyard and the moon is less familiar than a street lamp. If it takes a thief to catch a thief, the camera is the machine to catch the machine age.
Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon)
[Photographer, b. 1820, Paris, d. 1910, Paris.]
People were stunned when they heard that two inventors had perfected a process that could capture an image on a silver plate. It is impossible for us to imagine today the universal confusion that greeted this invention, so accustomed have we become to the fact of photography and so inured are we by now to its vulgarization.
(1900)
Nicholas Nixon
[Photographer, b. 1947, Detroit, Michigan, lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.]
[Digital is] the future. People will do terrific things in it, and it’s maybe better for color now. But I’m not interested in the way [this work] looks. So much is changed—veracity is lost. The quality of witness is compromised.
(2005)
Paul Outerbridge
[Photographer, b. 1896, New York, d. 1958, Laguna Beach, California.]
I had a growing feeling that most of the best art of the world in painting and sculpture had been done, and that this newest form [photography] was more related to the progress and tempo of modern science of the eye.
