Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
I have discovered camera is both a way of life and not enough to live by.
Mary Ellen Mark
[Photographer, b. 1940, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, d. 2015, New York.]
It’s not when you press the shutter, but why you press the shutter.
William Klein
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, lives in Paris.]
So who can pin down photography? We’re drunk with images. [Sontag’s] sick of it. I’m sick of it. But we’re moved by old amateur photographs because they aren’t concerned about theories of photography or what a picture must be. They’re just photographs without rules or dogma.
James Nachtwey
[Photographer, b. 1948, Syracuse, New York, lives in New York.]
I used to call myself a war photographer. Now I consider myself as an antiwar photographer.
Franz Kafka
[Writer, b. 1883, Prague, d. 1924, Prague.]
Your sight does not master the pictures, it is the pictures that master your sight.
Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen)
[Performance artist, b. 1943, Solingen, Germany, lives in Amsterdam.]
I didn’t care about the light conditions or formal aspects. I was never busy with the truth; I was always busy with reality. It is a big difference.
Martin Parr
[Photographer, b. 1952, Epson, Surrey, England, lives in Bristol and London, England.]
Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work.
Sally Mann
[Photographer, b. 1951, Lexington, Virginia, lives in Lexington.]
Photography would seem to preserve our past and make it invulnerable to the distortions of repeated memorial superimpositions, but I think that is a fallacy: photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories.
