Pablo Picasso
[Artist, b. 1881, Málaga, Spain, d. 1973, Mougin, France.]
When you see what you express through photography, you realize all the things that can no longer be the objective of painting. Why should the artist persist in treating subjects that can be established so clearly with the lens of a camera?
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
[Artist, b. 1841, Limoges, Haute-Vienne, France, d. 1919, Cagnes-sur-Mer, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, France.]
Photography freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits.
Man Ray (Emanuel Radnitsky)
[Artist, b. 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1976, Paris.]
I photograph what I do not wish to paint and I paint what I cannot photograph.
Thomas Demand
[Photographer, b. 1964, Munich, Germany, lives in Los Angeles.]
…if I’m invited to do a photography show, I tend to say no. The medium itself, I find, is a relatively boring context. You would never see a show about acrylic paint.
Marcel Duchamp
[Artist, b. 1887, Blainville, France, d. 1968, Neilly-sur-Seine, France.]
You know exactly what I think of photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable.
(In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz)
Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
All I care about these days is painting—photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.
George Bernard Shaw
[Writer, critic, and dramatist, b. 1856, Dublin, d. 1950, Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire, England.]
I would willingly exchange every single painting of Christ for one snapshot.
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.
