Robbert Flick
[Photographer, b. 1939, Amersfoort, Holland, lives in Los Angeles, California.]
Events exist in a continuum. The photographer does likewise. The connection between those two makes the photograph. The photograph is then separated, and the viewer deals with it. But it is still a part of that continuum, that process.
Nobuyoshi Araki
[Photographer, b. 1940, Tokyo, lives in Tokyo.]
When you hold on to something that moves, that is a kind of death. The camera, the photographic image have always called forth the idea of death. And I think about death when I photograph, as you can see in the pictures. That may be an oriental, Buddhist concept.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
... what founds the nature of Photography is the pose. The physical duration of this pose is of little consequence; even in the interval of a millionth of a second (Edgerton’s drop of milk) there has still been a pose, for the pose is not, here, the attitude of the target or even a technique of the Operator, but the term of an “intention” of reading: looking at a photograph, I inevitably include in my scrutiny the thought of that instant, however brief, in which a real thing happened to be motionless in front of the eye.
Berenice Abbott
[Photographer, writer, teacher, b. 1898, Springfield, Ohio, d. 1991, Monson, Maine.]
Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.
Sandy Skoglund
[Photographer, b. 1946, Quincy, Massachusetts, lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.]
I think I’m really fortunate to be an installation artist who is heavily invested in photography: I don’t have the emotional problems with the loss of work that some installation artists have. The photographs wouldn’t exist without the installation... but at the same time, I think I’d kill myself if I only did installations. There’s something deeply tragic about doing work that you know is temporal.
Chris Killip
[Photographer, b. 1946, Douglas, Isle of Man, United Kingdom, lives in Boston.]
The moment you make a photograph you consign whatever you photograph to the past as that specific moment no longer exists, it is history. The photography that I practice takes place in a specific time and place, depicting real moments in people’s lives. In some ways I think of myself as a historian, but not of the word. History is most often written from a distance, and rarely from the viewpoint of those who endured it.
Shimon Attie
[Photographer, b. 1957, Los Angeles, lives in New York.]
… my boundaries between past, present and future are perhaps more porous than other people’s. I think the same is true about text and image. Text is an image for me; when I use it visually I insist on it having the right quality. Words are images.
Lord Snowdon (Antony Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones)
[Earl and photographer, b. 1930, London, England, d. 2017, London.]
It’s no good saying “hold it” to a moment in real life.
