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) 
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?
Ed Ruscha
[Artist, b. 1937, Omaha, Nebraska, lives in Los Angeles.]
Unfortunately, there was no Jackson Pollock of the camera.
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.)
Man Ray (Emanuel Radnitsky)
[Artist, b. 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1976, Paris.]
Painting is directed by the heart through the eye. Photography is directed by the mind through the eye. But desire and love for the subject direct both mediums.
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.”
John Szarkowski
[Curator, critic, historian, and photographer, b. 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, d. 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]
The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process—a process based not in synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were
made... but photographs, as the man on the street puts it, were
taken.
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.
