John Szarkowski
[Curator, critic, historian, and photographer, b. 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, d. 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]
What’s happening is that people are making a billion photographs a year of their cats, frequently with the cats wearing costumes. Do you think I should be doing shows of cat photography?
Wright Morris
[Writer and photographer, b. 1910, Central City, Nebraska, d. 1998, Mill Valley, California.]
[We] make images to see clearly: then we see clearly what we have made.
Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Because a man trains himself to see like a camera, it is only more appropriate that he uses a camera to record his seeing.
Robert Frank
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1924, Zürich, Switzerland, lives in Mabou, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, and New York.]
[Taking photographs is] almost embarrassing, everyone does it, after all. And everyone has the pictures in their head already anyway, all more or less the same.
(2002)
Emile Zola
[Writer, b. 1840, Paris, France, d. 1902, Paris.]
In my view you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it.
Don DeLillo
[Writer, b. 1936, New York, lives in New York.]
In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too.
David Levi Strauss
[Writer and critic, b. 1953, Junction City, Kansas, lives in New York.]
Images online are both more ephemeral (in form) and more substantial (in number). They flicker across our eyes and jitter through our minds at incredible speeds. We spend more time collecting and sorting images, but less time looking at any one of them. One can never step into the same data-stream twice.
Alec Soth
[Photographer, b. 1969, Minneapolis, Minnesota, lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.]
In a world where the 2 billionth photograph has been uploaded to Flickr, which looks like an Eggleston picture! How do you deal with making photographs with the tens of thousands of photographs being uploaded to Facebook every second, how do you manage that? How do you contribute to that? What’s the point?
