Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
To photograph is to confer importance. There is probably no subject that cannot be beautified; moreover, there is no way to suppress the tendency in all photographs to accord value to their subjects.
Douglas Huebler
[Photographer and artist, b. 1924, Ann Arbor, Michigan, d. 1997, Truro, Massachusetts.]
I devise systems that allow me to subject things to a model of thought. In my work on duration, for instance, every event—even the most unexpected—occurs in conformity with the system I have previously set up. And the result can sometimes be quite beautiful, because it is arbitrary and because I have not chosen it to become a plastic object.
Richard Misrach
[Photographer, b. 1949, Los Angeles, lives in San Francisco.]
To me, the work I do is a means of interpreting unsettling truths, of bearing witness, and of sounding an alarm. The beauty of formal representation both carries an affirmation of life and subversively brings us face to face with news from our besieged world.
Walter Benjamin
[Philosopher, critic, and theorist, b. 1892, Berlin, d. 1940, Port Bou, France.]
It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty.
Sally Mann
[Photographer, b. 1951, Lexington, Virginia, lives in Lexington.]
We are spinning a story of what it is to grow up. It’s a complicated story and sometimes we try to take on the grand themes: anger, love, death, sensuality and beauty. Without fear and without shame.
David Hockney
[Artist, b. 1937, Bradford, England, lives in Bridlington, Yorkshire; London; and Los Angeles.]
... I discovered in photography that as things get closer to you, it gets more and more difficult to see, more and more difficult to piece together. It made me believe that the most interesting and mystical space we have is here, close to us, and not in outer space.
David LaChapelle
[Photographer, b. 1968, Connecticut, lives in New York.]
The two most ripped-off photographers in the past six years have been Nan Goldin and Larry Clark. These two artists took some harrowing pictures of themselves, their lovers, their fights. What some fashion photographers did was imitate these artists by getting some model and fucking up her hair and putting her in a Prada top and Gucci shoes and throwing her in a dirty apartment that’s not her own. They say these pictures are more modern and more real, but they’re fantasy presented as real. My work is fantasy presented as fantasy; I’m into escapism and beauty. I live on the Lower East Side, and once, I lived in a squat. I’ve had friends OD, so I don’t want to see someone looking strung out—I’ve been there.
Gregory Crewdson
[Photographer, b. 1962, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New Haven Connecticut.]
My first impulse is to make the most beautiful picture I can. But then I’m always interested in this idea of a kind of undercurrent in the work… I’m very interested in the uncanny and a way to find something mysterious or terrible within everyday life.
