Sally Mann
[Photographer, b. 1951, Lexington, Virginia, lives in Lexington.]

 There’s a kind of reverence that goes along with doing this process. You have to pay your dues to the photo gods. 

Allen Ginsberg
[Poet and writer, b. 1926, Newark, New Jersey, d. 1997, New York.]

 The poignancy of the photograph comes from looking back to a fleeting moment in a floating world. The transitoriness is what creates the sense of the sacred. 

Donald McCullin
[Photographer, b. 1935, Finsbury Park, London, lives in Somerset, England.]

 There is no doubt that my photographs have a very strong religious overtone, they are like twentieth century icons. When human beings are suffering, they tend to look up, as if hoping for salvation. And that’s when I press the button. 

David Hockney
[Artist, b. 1937, Bradford, England, lives in Bridlington, Yorkshire; London; and Los Angeles.]

 All religions are about social control. The church, when it had social control, commissioned paintings, which were made using lenses and when it stopped commissioning images, its power declined, slowly. Social control today is in the media—and based on photography. The continuum is the mirrors and lenses. 

Joel-Peter Witkin
[Photographer, b. 1939, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.]

 Artists are the people among us who realize creation didn’t stop on the sixth day. 

George Bernard Shaw
[Writer, critic, and dramatist, b. 1856, Dublin, d. 1950, Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire, England.]

 I would willingly exchange every single painting of Christ for one snapshot. 

Jesse Helms
[Politician and U.S. senator, b. 1921, Monroe, North Carolina, d. 2008, Raleigh, North Carolina.]

 I do not know Mr. Andres Serrano, and I hope I never meet him. Because he is not an artist, he is a jerk. Let us examine exactly what this bird did to get $15,000 of the taxpayers’ money through the so-called National Endowment for the Arts. If they have no more judgment than that, it ought to be abolished and all funds returned to the taxpayer. What this Serrano fellow did, he filled a bottle with his own urine and then stuck a crucifix down there—Jesus Christ on a cross. He set it up on a table and took a picture of it. (1989) 

André Bazin
[Film critic and theorist, b. 1918, Angers, France, d. 1958, Nogent-sur-Marne, Île-de-France, France.]

 Photography can strip from the world that spiritual dust and grime with which our eyes have covered it. 
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