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.
Edward Steichen
[Photographer and curator, b. 1879, Luxembourg, Germany, d. 1973, West Redding, Connecticut.]
Every other artist begins [with] a blank canvas, a piece of paper... the photographer begins with the finished product.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
[Artist, photographer, designer, and teacher, b. 1895, Bacsbarsod, Hungary, d. 1946, Chicago, Illinois.]
The invention of photography destroyed the canons of representational, imitative art.
Tom Wolfe
[Writer, b. 1930, Richmond, Virginia, d. 2018, 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.
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.
Chuck Close
[Artist, b. 1940, Monroe, Washington, lives in New York.]
The thing that interests me about photography, and why it’s different from all other media, is that it’s the only medium in which there is even the possibility of an accidental masterpiece.
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.
Peter Schjeldahl
[Writer and critic, b. 1942, Fargo, North Dakota, lives in New York.]
The dominant problem of pictorial art since the nineteen-fifties is photography, and, by extension, film and video. The basilisk eye of the camera has withered the pride of handworked mediums. Painting survives on a case-by-case basis, its successes amounting to special exemptions from a verdict of history.
