Gerhard Richter
[Artist, b. 1932, Dresden, lives in Düsseldorf.]
I had had enough of bloody painting, and painting from a photograph seemed to me the most moronic thing that anyone could do.
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.)
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.
Ed Ruscha
[Artist, b. 1937, Omaha, Nebraska, lives in Los Angeles.]
Unfortunately, there was no Jackson Pollock of the camera.
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)
John Ruskin
[Artist, writer and poet, b. 1819, London, d. 1900, Coniston Water, England.]
I tell you (dogmatically, if you like to call it so, knowing it well) a square inch of man’s engraving is worth all the photographs that were ever dipped in acid... Believe me, photography can do against line engraving just what Madame Tussaud’s wax-work can do against sculpture. That and no more.
(1865)
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.
Man Ray (Emanuel Radnitsky)
[Artist, b. 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1976, Paris.]
However rapidly I could paint, it was still drudgery after the instantaneous act of photography.
