Elliott Erwitt
[Photographer, b. 1928, Paris, France, lives in New York.]
It’s about time we started to take photography seriously and treat it as a hobby.
John Szarkowski
[Curator, critic, historian, and photographer, b. 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, d. 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]
...an enormously larger number of photographs have been made by dumb amateurs, commercial drudges, half-sober news photographers, celebrity merchants, real-estate salesmen, etc., than by photographers with clear and clean artistic intentions—which suggests that the former groups have likely made a great many pictures that might appeal to those of us interested in what photographs can look like, and in how they may contain and convey meaning.
Fred Ritchin
[Critic and writer, b. 1952, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]
We are all photographers suddenly, or surrounded by them.
Hiroshi Sugimoto
[Photographer, b. 1948, Tokyo, lives in New York.]
I didn’t want to be criticized for taking low-quality photographs, so I tried to reach the best, highest quality of photography and then to combine this with a conceptual art practice. But thinking back, that was the wrong decision [laughs]. Developing a low-quality aesthetic is a sign of serious fine art—I still see this.
Chuck Close
[Artist, b. 1940, Monroe, Washington, lives in New York.]
I always say that inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.
William Klein
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, lives in Paris.]
So who can pin down photography? We’re drunk with images. [Sontag’s] sick of it. I’m sick of it. But we’re moved by old amateur photographs because they aren’t concerned about theories of photography or what a picture must be. They’re just photographs without rules or dogma.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Photography is the only major art in which professional training and years of experience do not confer an insuperable advantage over the untrained and inexperienced—this for many reasons, among them the large role that chance (or luck) plays in the taking of pictures, and the bias toward the spontaneous, the rough, the imperfect.
Nathan Lyons
[Photographer, writer, and curator, b. 1930, Jamaica, New York, d. 2016, Rochester, New York.]
The accidents of millions of amateurs devoid of a picture vocabulary—which produced an outpouring of multiple exposures, distortions, unusual perspectives, foreshortening of planes, imbalance—has contributed greatly to the visual vocabulary of all media since before the turn of the century.
