W. Eugene Smith
[Photographer, b. 1918, Wichita, Kansas, d. 1978, Tucson, Arizona.]
I didn’t write the rules. Why would I follow them?
Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
I’m an anarchist, yes, because I’m alive. Life is a provocation... I’m against people in power and what that imposes on them. Anglo-Saxons have to learn what anarchism is. Ask a cat. A cat understands. They’re against discipline and authority. A dog is trained to obey. Cats can’t be. Cats bring on chaos.
John Heartfield (Helmut Franz Joseph Herzfeld)
[Artist, b. 1891, Munich, Germany, d. 1968, Berlin.]
Use Photography as a Weapon!
(Sign over the entrance to the John Heartfield room at the 1929 “Film und Foto” exhibition in Stuttgart.)
Willi Muenzenberg
[Photographer, politician, and propagandist, b. 1889, Erfurt, Germany, d. 1940, Paris.]
Photography has become an outstanding and indispensable means of propaganda in the revolutionary struggle.
David Hockney
[Artist, b. 1937, Bradford, England, lives in Bridlington, Yorkshire; London; and Los Angeles.]
All religions are about social control. The church, when it had social control, commissioned paintings, which were made using lenses and when it stopped commissioning images, its power declined, slowly. Social control today is in the media—and based on photography. The continuum is the mirrors and lenses.
Sergei Tretyakov
[Writer, critic, and artist, b. 1892, Guldiga, Russia (now Kuldigas, Latvia), d. 1939, Moscow.]
Every young boy with a camera wages war against the easel painters, and every little reporter-factographer can turn his pen into a mortal weapon against literature.
(1928)
Philip Jones Griffiths
[Photojournalist, b. 1936, Rhuddian, Wales, d. 2008, London.]
Virtually the whole of society believes in what they believe not by direct experience but by what they’ve been told. We photographers are in this exalted, privileged position of actually going out to find out for ourselves, and that’s why we’re so dangerous. Because we were there. We saw what happened.
Gertrude Käsebier
[Photographer, b. 1852, Fort Des Moines, Iowa, (now Des Moines), d. 1934, New York.]
The key to artistic photography is to work out your own thoughts, by yourselves. Imitation leads to certain disaster. New ideas are always antagonized. Do not mind that. If a thing is good it will survive.
