John Currin
[Artist, b. 1962, Boulder, Colorado, lives in New York.]
I’ve always found paintings of nudes depressing because they can’t compete with photographs. The grainiest photograph of some girl, a blurry Polaroid—you’d rather look at that than the Venus de Milo, because you think, “Wow, that’s really somebody... This camera really was in front of this real naked lady.”
Tristan Tzara (Sami Rosenstock)
[Writer and artist, b. 1896, Moineti, Bacu, Romania, d. 1963, Paris.]
When everything that is called art was well and truly riddled with rheumatism, the photographer lit the thousands of candles whose power is contained in his flame, and the sensitive paper absorbed by degrees the blackness cut out of some ordinary object. He had invented a fresh and tender flash of lightning.
John Gutmann
[Photographer, b. 1905, Breslau, Germany, (now Wroclaw, Poland), d. 1998, San Francisco, California.]
To me, photography was a completely new medium, and I did not... feel the urge to transfer to it my ideas about painting.
Tom Wolfe
[Writer, b. 1931, Richmond, Virginia, lives in New York.]
It was the unspoken curse of the medium, which went: “Photography is not really creative.” Naturally no painter would be so gauche as to say publicly that photography was not an art form. Nevertheless, there was an unuttered axiom: “Painters create, photographers select.” Not all the enlightened lip service in the world could change that feeling. The condescension with which the most insignificant painter could look down upon an Ansel Adams, a Steichen, or a Stieglitz was absolutely breathtaking. If sneers gave off heat, Alfred Stieglitz himself would have ended up about the size and shape of a smoked oyster.
Janet Malcolm
[Writer, b. 1934, Prague, Czechoslovakia, lives in New York.]
If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.
Man Ray (Emanuel Radnitsky)
[Artist, b. 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1976, Paris.]
A photograph is to a painting what an automobile is to a horse. A rider on his horse is a beautiful thing, but I prefer a man in an airplane.
Gustave Flaubert
[Writer, b. 1821, Rouen, Seine-Maritime, France, d. 1880, Rouen, France.]
DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.)
(From “The Dictionary of Received Ideas,” assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)
Vincent Van Gogh
[Artist, b. 1853, Zundert, Netherlands, d. 1890, Auvers-sur-Oise, France.]
I always think photographs abominable, and I don’t like to have them around, particularly not those of persons I know and love... photographic portraits wither much sooner than we ourselves do, whereas the painted portrait is a thing which is felt, done with love or respect for the human being that is portrayed.
