Paul Graham
[Photographer, b. 1956, Stafford, England, lives in New York.]
To photographers, street photography is a Himalayan range that the foolhardy pit themselves against. Or maybe it’s a shibboleth, a mystical visual code that only the indoctrinated members of our cult speak and revere.
Umberto Eco
[Writer, semiotician, and philosopher, b. 1932, Alessandria, Piedmont, Italy, d. 2016, Milan.]
If photography is to be likened to perception, this is not because the former is a “natural” process but because the latter is also coded.
Thomas Ruff
[Photographer, b. 1958, Zell, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf, Germany.]
Photography pretends to show reality. With your technique you have to go as near to reality as possible in order to imitate reality. And when you come so close then you recognize that, at the same time, it is not.
Jean-Luc Godard
[Filmmaker, b. 1930, Paris, lives in Rolle, Switzerland.]
The invention of photography. For whom? Against whom?
Sally Mann
[Photographer, b. 1951, Lexington, Virginia, lives in Lexington.]
I think my best pictures come when I push myself and tell myself: That’s not good enough; I could do better…. You have to be overcome your fear of the picture and take it.
Justine Kurland
[Photographer, b. 1969, Warsaw, New York, lives mostly on the road.]
Every adventure I’ve ever had with love and photography has ended in a similar misadventure. As is often the case, the rush of longing detaches from its object of desire, and my photographic ghosts lead me back to myself, alone.
Peter Galassi
[Curator and writer, b. 1951, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]
One of the great adventures of modernism began when painters closed the window of Renaissance perspective and contemplated the shuttered field of the picture plane. In theory, the medium of photography—a perfect, mechanical embodiment of perspective—would seem to have had no role to play in such an enterprise. But the photograph is a picture too, and photography’s modernist adventure might be described as a dialogue between the transparency of the open window and the impenetrable surface of the image.
Elinor Carcucci
[Photographer, b. 1971, Jerusalem, lives in New York.]
Before I fell in love with a man, I fell in love with photography.
(On herself at age seventeen)
