Daido Moriyama
[Photographer, b. 1938, Ikeda-cho, Osaka, Japan, lives in Tokyo.]
Nowadays, people take photos casually. Especially of their daily lives. The casual attitude toward photography is the same as mine. There is nothing right or wrong.
André Kertész
[Photographer, b. 1894, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1985, New York.]
I do what I feel, that’s all, I am an ordinary photographer working for his own pleasure. That’s all I’ve ever done.
John Szarkowski
[Curator, critic, historian, and photographer, b. 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, d. 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]
Since its earliest days, photography has been practiced by thousands who shared no common tradition or training, who were disciplined and united by no academy or guild, who considered their medium variously as a science, an art, a trade, or an entertainment, and who were often unaware of each other’s work... Some of these pictures were the product of knowledge and skill and sensibility and invention; many were the product of accident, improvisation, misunderstanding, and empirical experiment. But whether produced by art or by luck, each picture was part of a massive assault on our traditional habits of seeing.
Alfred Eisenstaedt
[Photographer, b. 1898, Dirschau, West Prussia (now Tczew, Poland), d. 1995, New York.]
I waited, focused, waited again for several minutes, then—remember, I always behaved like an amateur with little equipment—click, it was done.
Chris Marker
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1921, Neuilly-sur-Seine, Île-de-France, d. 2012, Paris.]
We feel more emotion... before an amateur photograph linked to our own life history than before the work of a Great Photographer, because his domain partakes of art, and the intent of the souvenir-object remains at the lower level of personal history.
Frederick Sommer
[Photographer, b. 1905, Angri, Italy, d. 1999, Prescott, Arizona.]
I could take a cow and implant a camera in it and let it amble around the city or in its own domain (I say a cow because a human being I would not trust). If the camera was programmed to go off at an indeterminate series of moments, the samplings would be fantastic.
Nancy Foote
[Writer and Critic, lives in America.]
Despite its dependence on photography, however, conceptual art exhibits little photographic self-consciousness, setting itself apart from so-called serious photography by a snapshot-like amateurism and nonchalance that would raise the hackles of any earnest professional.
Terence Donovan
[Photographer, b. 1936, Stepney, England, d. 1996, London.]
Look at them, running off 90 rolls of film in the hope that one of them will have a picture on it. Not one of them has seen the inside of a darkroom and most of the buggers don’t know how to load a fucking camera.
(On imitators)
