Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
If photographs are our connection to the past, it’s a very peculiar, fragile, sentimental connection. You take a photograph before you destroy something. The photograph is its posthumous existence.
Martine Franck
[Photographer, b. 1938, Antwerp, Belgium, d. 2012, Paris.]
My grandfather killed himself falling off the dike in Ostend while photographing my two cousins. This can happen so easily when looking through a lens: for a split second nothing else exists outside the frame.
Norman Mailer
[Writer, b. 1923, Long Branch, New Jersey, d. 2007, New York.]
Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
Janet Malcolm
[Writer, b. 1934, Prague, Czechoslovakia, lives in New York.]
There are good photographers who might elevate themselves to the ranks of the great simply by burning most of their work.
Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]
Nature photography… that acknowledges what is wrong, is admittedly sometimes hard to bear—it has to encompass our mistakes. Yet in the long run, it is important; in order to endure our age of apocalypse, we have to be reconciled not only to avalanche and hurricane, but to ourselves.
Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
My photography was a semi-conscious reaction against right-thinking and optimism; it was an attack on the establishment.
Deborah Turbeville
[Photographer, b. 1932, Medford, Massachusetts, d. 2013, New York.]
I destroy the image after I’ve made it, obliterate it a little so you never have it completely there.
Jeff Wall
[Photographer, b. 1946, Vancouver, Canada, lives in Vancouver.]
I’ve always felt that good art has to reflect somehow on its own process of coming to be.
