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.
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.
Ezra Pound
[Poet, b. 1885, Hailey, Idaho, d. 1972, Venice, Italy.]
Almost any fool can paint an academy picture, and any imbecile can shoot off a Kodak.
Jacques-Henri Lartigue
[Photographer, b. 1894, Courbevoie, France, d. 1986, Nice, France.]
I have two pairs of eyes—one to paint, and one to take photographs. There is little relationship between the two.
Jean-Dominique Ingres
[Artist, b. 1780, Montauban, France, d. 1867, Paris, France.]
Which of us could achieve this exactitude... this delicate modeling... indeed, what a wonderful thing photography is—but one dare not say that aloud.
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.
Vik Muniz
[Artist, b. 1961, Sao Paulo, Brazil, lives in New York.]
Now that photography is a digital medium, the ghost of painting is coming to haunt it: photography no longer retains a sense of truth. I think that's great, because it frees photography from factuality, the same way photography freed painting from factuality in the mid-nineteenth century.
Stephen Shore
[Photographer, b. 1947, New York, lives in New York.]
With a painting, you’re taking basic building blocks and making something that’s more complex than what you started with. It is a synthetic process. A photograph does the opposite: It takes the world, and puts an order on it, simplifies it.
