Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
The process itself has a kind of exactitude, a kind of scrutiny that we’re not normally subject to. I mean that we don't subject each other to. We’re nicer to each other than the intervention of the camera is going to make us. It’s a little bit cold, a little bit harsh.
Paolo Pellegrin
[Photographer, b. 1964, Rome, lives in Paris.]
Photography is much like writing to me. It’s a voice.
Margaret Bourke-White
[Photographer, b. 1904, New York, d. 1971, Darien, Connecticut.]
It was not that I was against marriage, despite my initial unhappy experience. But... I had picked a life that dealt with excitement, tragedy, mass calamities, human triumphs and human suffering. To throw my whole self into recording and attempting to understand these things I needed an inner serenity as a kind of balance. This was something I could not have if I was torn apart for fear of hurting someone every time an assignment of this kind came up.
Rineke Dijkstra
[Photographer, b. 1959, Sittard, The Netherlands, lives in Amsterdam.]
For me, the importance of photography is that you can point to something, that you can let other people see things. Ultimately, it is a matter of the specialness of the ordinary.
Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
Meanwhile, please get me permissions, both posh and sordid... The more the merrier. We can’t tell in advance where the most interesting photographs will be. I can only get photographs by photographing. I will go anywhere.
(To Esquire magazine, 1959)
Joachim Schmid
[Photographer and "professional looker", b. 1955, Balingen, Germany, lives in Berlin.]
The most striking feature of the new is the sheer mass. Photography was previously a mass phenomenon, but now, quantity is doubtless the outstanding quality. For a long time photos have been taken frequently and everywhere, but now photos are taken permanently and everywhere,... What is new is that we can watch them practically in real time.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
I weave around the subject like a referee in a boxing match. We are passive onlookers in a world that moves perpetually. Our only moment of creation is that 1/25th of a second when the shutter clicks, the signal is given, and the knife falls. We are like skilled shots who pull the trigger and hit their target.
Harry Callahan
[Photographer, b. 1912, Detroit, Michigan, d. 1999, Atlanta, Georgia.]
Everything was Bauhaus this and Bauhaus that. I wanted to break it... I got tired of experimentation. I got sick of the solarization and reticulation and walked-on negatives. What I was interested in was the technique of seeing... I introduced problems like “evidence of man,” and talking to people—making portraits on the street... I thought [the students] should enter into dealings with human beings and leave abstract photography. I felt that social photography would be the next concern.
