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. 
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