Mario Giacomelli
[Photographer, b. 1925, Senigallia, Italy, d. 2000, Senigallia.]
To be sure the landscape can’t run away, and yet I always fear that it may. [Sometimes] I must set up my tripod, so I worry that the landscape may disappear the next second and I don't stop keeping an eye on it while I get prepared. Then, when pressing the shutter, I hold my breath. These moments are the greatest joys in my life, as if I were undressing the most beautiful woman in the world—that is, if she will allow herself be undressed. If the photo is a success, it means that she was willing. If not, it has been a lovely dream.
Régis Durand
[Critic, writer, and curator, lives in Paris.]
There lies something, in the photograph, of unconscious desire, but hardly anything on its surface can lead back to its source—except precisely the sense of its having come from a source, and of the ensuing transformation and loss.
Jeanloup Sieff
[Photographer, b. 1930, Paris, d. 2001, Paris.]
If I have caught myself struggling to remember, it was, if not a pretense, at least premature, in that I only ever used photography for my own pleasure—even if I then bewailed the vanished pleasure which my pictures brought back to me.
Jane Welsh Carlyle
[Writer, b. 1801, Haddington, Scotland, d. 1866, London, England.]
Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything else that has cast up in my time or is like to—this art by which even the poor can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones. And mustn’t it be acting favourably on the morality of the country?
(1859)
Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
Leaving aside the mysteries and the inequities of human talent, brains, taste, and reputations, the matter of art in photography may come down to this: it is the capture and projection of the delights of seeing; it is the defining of observation full and felt.
Corinne Day
[Photographer, b. 1962, Ealing, West London, d. 2010, Denham, England.]
[My brain tumor] was like a bungee jump into hell, like falling and falling forever. It was terrifying, I gave Mark my camera, and told him, “Photograph everything.”
Margaret Bourke-White
[Photographer, b. 1904, New York, d. 1971, Darien, Connecticut.]
I know of nothing to equal the happy expectancy of finding something new, something unguessed in advance, something only you would find, because as well as being a photographer, you were a certain kind of human being, and you would react to something all others might walk by.
Ernest Hemingway
[Writer, b. 1899, Oak Park, Illinois, d. 1961, Ketchum, Idaho.]
[Robert] Capa: He was a good friend and a great and very brave photographer. It is bad luck for everybody that the percentages caught up with him. It is especially bad for Capa.
(On Capa’s death in Vietnam, May, 27, 1954)
