Marc Riboud
[Photographer, b. 1923, St.-Genis-Laval, France, d. 2016, Paris.]
Doubt always hovers nearby, but I take photographs the way a musician hums. Looking is like breathing. So when luck turns my way and offers me a good picture, joy is surely nigh.
Rinko Kawauchi
[Photographer, b. 1972, Shiga, Japan, lives in Kanagawa, Japan.]
For a photographer, it’s a necessity that you can shoot stuff magically. Accidents are necessary, but after I take the photograph, it’s not over. I work on it more.
Pedro Meyer
[Photographer, b. 1935, Madrid, Spain, lives in Mexico City.]
I am of course not questioning the validity of patience that some great photographers have exerted in order to get at exactly the image that they imagined, but even when patience was at the core of such endeavors an element of chance would inevitably crop up here and there. I personally dislike the notion that my work would be determined mainly by luck.
Charles Traub
[Photographer, writer, and critic, b. 1945, Louisville, Kentucky, lives in New York.]
For me, serendipity, coincidence and chance are more interesting than any preconceived construct of our human encounters.
Adrian Piper
[Artist, b. 1948, Harlem, New York, lives in Hyannis, Massachusetts.]
My work is an act of communication, and it’s important to me the way what I assert lands, and where it lands within someone who sees it. On the other hand, I also recognize fully and live by the principle that once the work leaves my studio, I cannot control the effects it has.
Jeff Wall
[Photographer, b. 1946, Vancouver, Canada, lives in Vancouver.]
Art inherently involves artistry. I prepare certain things carefully because I believe that’s what’s required. Other things are completely left to chance. Anything that is prepared, constructed, or organized is done in order to allow the unpredictable “something” to appear and, in appearing, to create the real beauty of the picture, any picture.
Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
One thing that struck me very early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.
John Divola
[Photographer, b. 1949, Los Angeles, lives in Los Angeles.]
I really don’t worry too much about what I see through the viewfinder, at least not at that point, especially if I’m using a flash because I don’t know what it’s going to do. I just see vague potentiality. It’s really working with a set of attributes that will hopefully interact in an interesting way.
