Susie Linfield
[Writer and critic, New York, lives in New York.]
Photographs illuminate the terribly damaged family of man to which, I’m afraid, we all belong.
Allan Sekula
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1951, Erie, Pennsylvania, d. 2013, Los Angeles.]
Communications technologies—photographic reproduction, linked computers—provide strong tools for the instrumental channeling of human desire… disguised as a benign expansion of the field of human intimacy.
(2002)
Martin Parr
[Photographer, b. 1952, Epson, Surrey, England, lives in Bristol and London, England.]
Everyone is a photographer now, remember. That’s the great thing about photography.
Daido Moriyama
[Photographer, b. 1938, Ikeda-cho, Osaka, Japan, lives in Tokyo.]
Until a few years ago, I was able to stave off an awareness that there is not an ounce of beauty in the world, and that humanity is a thing of extreme hideousness. So I could shoot and believe in something.
(1972)
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
I am the reference of every photograph, and this is what generates my astonishment in addressing myself to the fundamental question: why is it that I am alive here and now?
George Santayana
[Philosopher and writer, b. 1863, Madrid, Spain, d. 1952, Rome, Italy.]
As students of zoology put on their slides infinitely fine and numerous sections of the specimens they study, so the photographer can furnish for the instruction of posterity infinitely fine and numerous cross-sections of the present world of men.
(1912)
Cornell Capa (Kornél Friedmann)
[Writer and photographer, b. 1918, Budapest, Hungary, d. 2008, New York.]
When you look at my work, you will notice the absence of still lifes and landscapes. I am interested in human beings, their lives, their habitats, their behavior, and their relationships, familial and beyond.
Mario Giacomelli
[Photographer, b. 1925, Senigallia, Italy, d. 2000, Senigallia.]
A photo isn’t only what you see, but also what your imagination adds to it. My own imagination may add something else, a third person’s something else again. But does it matter? What matters is the contact between us, the fact that we talk about trees losing their leaves, about objects we crush underfoot without realizing it, about that house dying gently, abandoned by its owner, even though it’s the house where he was born, where he learnt to cry and to laugh.
