Robert Frank
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1924, Zürich, Switzerland, lives in Mabou, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, and New York.]
The eye should learn to listen before it looks.
Anthony Hernandez
[Photographer, b. 1947, Los Angeles, lives in Los Angeles.]
The hardest pictures I’ve ever made were the homeless pictures. I wasn’t in a war zone, but it is as if I were. It’s hard to reconcile the larger segment of society, which is so ordinary, and which would just like the homeless to disappear, with the greatness of the country. We’re reminded that however “great” this country is, the homeless stand for the failure to face the future.
Edward Weston
[Photographer, b. 1886, Highland Park, Illinois, d. 1958, Wildcat Hill, California.]
I am having another reaction, from my statement that I could go through life with one woman! Ridiculous thought! Imagine never again having the thrill of courting,—the conquest,—new lips to find,—new bodies to caress. It would be analogous to making my last print, nailing it to the wall forever, seeing it there, until I would despise it or no longer notice it was there.
Weegee (Usher Fellig)
[Photographer, b. 1899, Zlothew near Lemberg, Austrian Galicia (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), d. 1968, New York.]
There are photographic fanatics, just as there are religious fanatics. They buy a so-called candid camera... there is no such thing: it’s the photographer who has to be candid, not the camera.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
The only thing about photography which interests me is the aim, the taking aim.
Hiroshi Hamaya
[Photographer, b. 1915, Tokyo, Japan, d. 1999, Kanagawa, Japan.]
For years my only purpose was to do documentary photos for magazines, without any idea that they were part of a larger project. It was as if I were carried along by a stream—even though I believed that the current was taking me in the right direction.
Herman Melville
[Writer, b. 1819, New York, d. 1891, New York.]
Almost everybody is having his ‘mug’ engraved nowadays; so that this test of distinction is going to be reversed; and therefore, to see one’s ‘mug’ in a magazine, is presumptive evidence that he’s a nobody... I respectfully decline being
oblivionated.
Sandy Skoglund
[Photographer, b. 1946, Quincy, Massachusetts, lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.]
My work involves the physical manifestation of emotional reality. Thus, the invisible becomes visible; the normal, abnormal; and the familiar, unfamiliar. Ordinary life is an endless source of fascination to me in its ritualistic objects and behavior.
