John Muir
[Self-described "Poetico-trampo-geologist-botanist and ornithologist-naturalist etc.", b. 1838, Dunbar, Scotland, d. 1914, Los Angeles.]
See how willingly Nature poses herself upon photographers’ plates. No earthly chemicals are so sensitive as those of the human soul.
Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
...nature photographs downright bore me for some reason or other. I think: “Oh, yes. Look at that sand dune. What of it?”
André Kertész
[Photographer, b. 1894, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1985, New York.]
Photography cannot make nature more beautiful. Nature is the most beautiful thing in the world. You can show the beauty, illustrate it, but it is never the real beauty—very far from it.
Heinrich Heine
[Writer, b. 1797, Düsseldorf, Germany, d. 1856, Paris.]
Photography is a witness against the mistaken opinion that art is an imitation of nature.
Wynn Bullock
[Photographer, b. 1902, Chicago, Illinois, d. 1975, Monterey, California.]
I didn’t want to tell the tree or weed what it was. I wanted it to tell me something and through me express its meaning in nature.
Henri Matisse
[Artist, b. 1869, Le Cateau-Cambrésis, France, d. 1954, Nice, France.]
Photographs will always be impressive because they show us nature, and all artists will find in them a world of sensations. The photographer must therefore intervene as little as possible, so as not to cause photography to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses, notwithstanding its defects.
Alfred Stieglitz
[Photographer and curator, b. 1864, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1946, New York.]
The sharp outlines which we Americans are so proud of as being proof of great perfection in our art are
untrue to Nature, and hence an abomination to the artist.
(1892)
Rosalind Krauss
[Writer, critic, and historian, b. 1941, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]
If we are to generalize the aesthetic of surrealism, the concept of Convulsive Beauty is at the core of that aesthetic: reducing to an experience of reality transformed into a representation. Surreality is, we could say, nature convulsed into a kind of writing. The special access that photography has to this experience is its privileged connection to the real.
