Andres Serrano
[Artist, b. 1950, New York, lives in New York.]
An artist is nothing without his or her obsessions, and I have mine. One of the things that always bothered me was the fundamentalist labeling of my work as “anti-Christian bigotry.” As a former Catholic, and as someone who even today is not opposed to being called a Christian, I felt I had every right to use the symbols of the Church and resented being told not to.
André Bazin
[Film critic and theorist, b. 1918, Angers, France, d. 1958, Nogent-sur-Marne, Île-de-France, France.]
Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.
Bill Owens
[Photographer, b. 1938, San Jose, California, lives in Hayward, California.]
I’d been traveling the world and suddenly I got to Livermore and I was in total culture shock. I had a wife and baby and everybody my age already had the house and the swimming pool and the two cars. I’m shooting the Rotary Club, the Junior Women’s Club and thinking, “Who are these people?” But I start to get to know them. I’d go out and shoot them for the newspaper and then think, “Man, I ought to go back and shoot this on my own time.”
(On his book “Suburbia”)
Ingrid Sischy
[Editor and writer, b. 1952, Johannesburg, South Africa, d. 2015, New York.]
To aestheticize tragedy is the fastest way to anesthetize the feelings of those who are witnessing it. Beauty is a call to admiration, not to action.
Alexandre Dumas
[Writer, b. 1802, Villers-Cotterêts, France, d. 1870, Puys, France.]
I may mention here, again, the horror I have already expressed elsewhere,
á propos of a portrait of myself, which one of the journals have published; I may also add, that I have a horror of photography, and that this horror extends itself to all photographers.
(1866)
Jack Kerouac (Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac)
[Writer, b. 1922, Lowell, Massachusetts, d. 1969, St. Petersburg, Florida.]
...[the photographer] can be considered a kind of disembodied burrowing eye, a conspirator against time and its hammers. His work, print after print of it, seems to call to be shown before the decay which it portrays flattens all... Here are the records of the age before an imminent collapse.
Sabrina Harman
[U.S. military guard at Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq, b. 1978, Lorton, Virginia, lives in Virginia.]
... it went too far even I can’t handle whats going on. I can’t get it out of my head. I walk down stairs after blowing the whistle and beating on the cells with an asp to find “the taxicab driver” handcuffed backwards to his window naked with his underwear over his head and face. He looked like Jesus Christ. At first I had to laugh so I went on and grabbed the camera and took a picture.
(October 20, 2003, written from Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq to her friend Kelly)
Wallace Stevens
[Poet, b. 1879, Reading, Pennsylvania, d. 1955, Hartford, Connecticut.]
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
