Douglas McCulloh
[Photographer, b. 1959, Los Angeles, lives in Los Angeles.]
Photography has a natural affinity for the strategies of surrealism—the exaltation of chance and eros, the exploration of obsession and the release of the unconscious.
Chip Simons
[Photographer, b. 1958, Ohio, lives in Bosque Farms, New Mexico.]
One way to keep growing is to make mistakes. Sometimes I’ll take fifty pictures a night, working through all these crazy ideas, running into stuff I never could have predicted. I’m making all kinds of great mistakes, and, I think, that’s so funny how this happened. If you just go out and take a lot of pictures, you learn and you grow. Accidents happen.
Stephen Shore
[Photographer, b. 1947, New York, lives in New York.]
I enjoy the camera. Beyond that it is difficult to explain the process of photographing except by analogy: The trout streams where I flyfish are cold and clear and rich in the minerals that promote the growth of stream life. As I wade a stream I think wordlessly of where to cast the fly. Sometimes a difference of inches is the difference between catching a fish and not. When the fly I’ve cast is on the water my attention is riveted to it. I’ve found through experience that whenever—or so it seems—my attention wanders or I look away then surely a fish will rise to the fly and I will be too late setting the hook. I watch the fly calmly and attentively so that when the fish strikes—I strike. Then the line tightens, the playing of the fish begins, and time stands still.
Frederick Sommer
[Photographer, b. 1905, Angri, Italy, d. 1999, Prescott, Arizona.]
There isn’t a lot that can be done about taking a good photograph... You have to accept an involved set of circumstances. And this involved set of circumstances is extraordinary and great for the simple reason that you don’t understand it.
Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.
Alec Soth
[Photographer, b. 1969, Minneapolis, Minnesota, lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.]
With my photography, I’m a big believer in serendipity. The goal is to find the flow of things.
Helmut Newton
[Photographer, b. 1920, Berlin, d. 2004, Los Angeles.]
...what I try to do is a good bad picture. I work it out very carefully, and then I do something that looks as if it went wrong.
Donald McCullin
[Photographer, b. 1935, Finsbury Park, London, lives in Somerset, England.]
Although I take my work seriously I cannot take myself seriously. When you think of it, everything has happened by accident. I have always believed that I don’t own my photography, rather that it owns me. It gave me a life, an extraordinary life which could never be repeated. I feel as if the gift of seeing what is really going on in the world is mine only so long as I put it to proper use. There is nothing to be claimed and nothing to regret, except that we go on treating our fellow human beings so badly.
