Ralph Waldo Emerson
[Writer and thinker, b. 1803, Boston, Massachusetts, d. 1882, Concord, Massachusetts.]
To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in
the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen
before and which shall never be seen again.
Max Kozloff
[Critic, editor, and photographer, b. 1933, Chicago, Illinois, lives in New York.]
No matter how physically faint, a photograph involuntarily whisper of something exquisitely carnal. The weeks, the years, whatever stretches of time separating our present from the photographs retire into the transparence of the shot and seem erased by it. We almost have to shake ourselves to overcome the feeling that we peer out at the other place, in that different age. Yet we are always aware of this illusory dislocation, for such is the ambiguity, in principle, that seduces us over and over again in the photographic experience.
Mary Ellen Mark
[Photographer, b. 1940, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, d. 2015, New York.]
It’s not when you press the shutter, but why you press the shutter.
Mario Sorrenti
[Photographer, b. 1971, Naples, Italy, lives in New York.]
I got into photography because of the immediacy of the medium. I used to sit in front of a canvas for weeks trying to create something. Now I can see the image right away.
Eikoh Hosoe
[Photographer, b. 1933, Yonezawa, Yamagata Prefecture, Japan, lives in Tokyo.]
When you take a photo at 1/1000 of a second, the moment can become an eternal fact, an eternal moment. So we have a philosophical problem of objectivity and subjectivity.
John Loengard
[Photographer, editor, and critic, b. 1934, New York, lives in New York.]
Perishability in a photograph is important in a picture. If a photograph looks perishable we say, “Gee, I’m glad I have that moment.”
