Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
Weegee (Usher Fellig)
[Photographer, b. 1899, Zlothew near Lemberg, Austrian Galicia (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), d. 1968, New York.]
I can take a camera and paint with it. Nobody has exhausted the possibilities of the camera.
Gerhard Richter
[Artist, b. 1932, Dresden, lives in Düsseldorf.]
All photographs are far more important than any painting.
George Bernard Shaw
[Writer, critic, and dramatist, b. 1856, Dublin, d. 1950, Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire, England.]
As to the painters and their fanciers, I snort defiance at them; their day of daubs is over.
(1901)
Man Ray (Emanuel Radnitsky)
[Artist, b. 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1976, Paris.]
I have freed myself from the sticky medium of paint and am working directly with light itself.
(On “Rayographs,” his term for photograms.)
Cindy Sherman
[Artist, b. 1954, Glen Ridge, New Jersey, lives in New York.]
....I didn’t really have ideas of what I wanted to do with painting. That was when I thought, “Why am I wasting my time elaborately copying things when I could use a camera?”
George Bernard Shaw
[Writer, critic, and dramatist, b. 1856, Dublin, d. 1950, Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire, England.]
The hand of the painter is incurably mechanical: his technique is incurably artificial... The camera... is so utterly unmechanical.
Larry Clark
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1943, Tulsa, Oklahoma, lives in New York.]
I always wished I could be a painter or a filmmaker, anything but a fucking photographer. I certainly didn’t want to be in a photography gallery.
