Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
Choosing a project can be ironic. Everybody’s got irony. You can’t avoid it. It’s in the structure, the detail, the significance... What I mean is, I would never choose a subject for what it means to me. I choose a subject and then what I feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold.
Daido Moriyama
[Photographer, b. 1938, Ikeda-cho, Osaka, Japan, lives in Tokyo.]
Photographs are pieces of the everlasting world—daily life—and fossils of light and time. They are also fragments of presentiment, inspiration, record, and memory about human beings and their history, as well as another language and world that becomes visible and intelligible through objectifying reality by means of cameras. They show us beauty and tenderness and also ugliness and cruelty now and then, not as the answer but always as a new question. I believe photographs to be pieces of an incomplete jigsaw puzzle. Which is why I have been and will be devoted to photography.
Brassaï (Gyula Halász)
[Photographer, b. 1889, Brassó, Transylvania, Hungary (now Romania), d. 1984, Eze, Alpes-Maritimes, France.]
The clear view of objects has opened my eyes, and today I can see into the heart of matters. How can I catch royal game with this dragnet that is photography?
Tod Papageorge
[Photographer, b. 1940, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, lives in New Haven, Connecticut.]
The picture was never to be fetishized. It was simply an instrument for learning more in relation to the question of what photography might be... It was simply being out in the world and making photographs to try to understand what this picture-making system was about.
Uta Barth
[Photographer, b. 1958, Berlin, lives in Los Angeles.]
I keep trying to find ways to shift the viewer’s attention away from the object they are looking at and toward their own perceptual process in relation to that object. The question for me always is: how can I make you aware of your own activity of looking, instead of losing your attention to thoughts about what it is that you are looking at?
Edward Weston
[Photographer, b. 1886, Highland Park, Illinois, d. 1958, Wildcat Hill, California.]
The lens reveals more than the eye sees. Then why not use this potentiality to advantage?
(1928)
Susie Linfield
[Writer and critic, New York, lives in New York.]
…images have become more extreme as political clarity has dissipated; this is, I think, no coincidence…. What happens to documentary photography—to the photography of witness—when it no longer has a politics it can support?
Juergen Teller
[Photographer, b. 1964, Erlangen, Germany, lives in London.]
I don’t care about fashion at all. And I know it’s kind of a dodgy thing to be a fashion photographer, a kind of pathetic occupation, but I like it, even though I question it.
