Nobuyoshi Araki
[Photographer, b. 1940, Tokyo, lives in Tokyo.]
Don’t you think that it is necessary to have a sense of brutality in photography?
W. Eugene Smith
[Photographer, b. 1918, Wichita, Kansas, d. 1978, Tucson, Arizona.]
I didn’t write the rules. Why would I follow them?
Siegfried Kracauer
[Media critic and sociologist, b. 1889, Frankfurt, Germany, d. 1966, New York.]
The question is whether the image decisively catches reality.
(1930)
John Szarkowski
[Curator, critic, historian, and photographer, b. 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, d. 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]
...photographs explain very little, even of small private issues. Photographs show what things look like, at a given moment from a certain vantage point, and sometimes this knowledge proposes the most interesting and cogent questions.
Wynn Bullock
[Photographer, b. 1902, Chicago, Illinois, d. 1975, Monterey, California.]
When I photograph, what I’m really doing is seeking answers to things.
Thomas Ruff
[Photographer, b. 1958, Zell, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf, Germany.]
If things are the way they are, why should I try to make them look different?
Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]
Henry James proposed asking of art three modest and appropriate questions: What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing?
Garry Winogrand
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, d. 1984, Tijuana, Mexico.]
You know why your pictures are no fucking good? Because they don’t describe the chaos of life.
(Quoted by Philip-Lorca DiCorcia)
