Jean Baudrillard
[Writer and theorist, b. 1929, Reims, France, d. 2007, Paris.]

 Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images. 

Malick Sidibé
[Photographer, b. 1935, Soloba, Mali, d. 2016, Bamako, Mali.]

 Man tried to imitate God by drawing; then we invented the photo. 

Jan Saudek
[Photographer, b. 1935, Prague, Czechoslovakia, lives in Prague.]

 What I really do is make portraits of the soul. 

Hiroshi Sugimoto
[Photographer, b. 1948, Tokyo, lives in New York.]

 I’m inviting the spirits into my photography. It’s an act of God. 

Emmet Gowin
[Photographer, b. 1941, Danville, Virginia, lives in Princeton, New Jersey.]

 The picture is like a prayer, an offering, and hopefully an opening through which to seek what we don’t know, or already know and should take seriously. 

Lucas Samaras
[Artist, b. 1936, Kastoria, Greece, lives in New York.]

 You don’t have to say that nature is aware of your existence, that God knows you are here and you are suffering or having joy. The camera gives you proof that you have lived at least once. 

Abelardo Morell
[b. 1948, Havana, Cuba, lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.]

 I want my photographs to reflect a time when science, art, philosophy, and religion were closer brothers and sisters, as they were during Fox Talbot’s time. 

Secondo Pia
[Lawyer and amateur photographer, b. 1855, Asti, Italy, d. 1941, Milan.]

 No human being could have painted this negative that lies hidden in the stains. ... If it was not painted, not made by human hands, then ... (On his 1898 photograph which highlighted the alleged face in what is known as “the Shroud of Turin.”) 
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