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.
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)
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)
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.
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.
André Bazin
[Film critic and theorist, b. 1918, Angers, France, d. 1958, Nogent-sur-Marne, Île-de-France, France.]
All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence.
Francis Galton
[Polymath, explorer, anthropologist, inventor, meteorologist, statistician, b. 1822, Birmingham, England, d. Haslemere, Surrey, England.]
[My composite portrait process] represents no man in particular, but portrays an imaginary figure possessing the average features of any group of men. These ideal faces have a surprising air of reality. Nobody who glanced at one of them for the first time, would doubt its being the likeness of a living person, yet, as I have said, it is no such thing; it is the portrait of a type and not of an individual.
(1879)
Massimo Vitali
[Photographer, b. 1944, Como, Italy, lives in Lucca, Italy.]
My photography comes from absolute matter-of-fact situations but also from a deep curiosity that I possess for people, for what they do and how they think.
