David Wojnarowicz
[Artist and activist, b. 1954, Redbank, New Jersey, d. 1990, New York.]
I am all emptiness and futility. I am an empty stranger, a carbon copy of my form. I can no longer find what I’m looking for outside of myself. It doesn’t exist out there. Maybe it’s only in here, inside my head. But my head is glass and my eyes have stopped being cameras, the tape has run out and nobody’s words can touch me.
David Maisel
[Photographer, b. 1961, New York, lives in San Francisco.]
I seek to reveal the landscape in something other than purely visual terms, the photograph transcribing it as an archetypal space of destruction and ruin that mirrors the darker corners of our consciousness.
Donald McCullin
[Photographer, b. 1935, Finsbury Park, London, lives in Somerset, England.]
The darkroom can be cruel. You have to talk your way through your printing, alone, sometimes you turn the radio on and listen to trash music. When I finish, I wash everything meticulously, I dust everything, it’s like paying a homage to the spiritual power that could destroy me. And I won’t let it. Something else will destroy me—but it won’t be the darkroom, it won’t be photography. I am very strong, nearly ninety nine percent of me is strong and fortified all around. But I am sure there is a crack, somewhere behind me, in my make-up, where the damage will get in and destroy me.
W. Eugene Smith
[Photographer, b. 1918, Wichita, Kansas, d. 1978, Tucson, Arizona.]
Other than that, Icarus, how was the flight?
(On his monumental, troubled Pittsburgh photo project “Labyrinthian Walk.”)
Edmundo Desnoes
[Writer, b. 1930, Havana, Cuba, lives in New York.]
The richness of our contemporary visual world must be seen as a danger. It is an overwhelming and oppressive world. A world that manifests itself fundamentally through the image is only a few steps from totalitarian manipulation.
Arno Rafael Minkkinen
[Photographer, b. 1945, Helsinki, Finland, lives in Andover, Massachusetts.]
I think photography piles up the limitations more than any other medium I know… To outwit the calamities, I have learned to formulate a partnership with spontaneity.
Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
If you read what, say, Weston was writing in the 1920s he talked about an industrial medium, reflective surfaces, contemporary subject matter—it’s a straighter line to [Ed] Ruscha’s
26 Gas Stations than it would ever be to Ansel Adam’s pictures of Yosemite and their kitschy calendar sensibility.
Gustave Flaubert
[Writer, b. 1821, Rouen, Seine-Maritime, France, d. 1880, Rouen, France.]
PHOTOGRAPHY Will make painting obsolete. (See DAGUERREOTYPE.)
(From “The Dictionary of Received Ideas,” assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)
