Sheila Metzner
[Photographer, b. 1939, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New York.]
My mother was so poor that she couldn’t afford an encyclopedia so the salesman gave her two volumes from A to E. But in those volumes were Africa, Antarctica, Egypt. From the beginning, the strangeness of mankind was appealing to me, and I wanted to see it myself and document it myself.
Keith Carter
[Photographer, b. 1948, Madison, Wisconsin, lives in Beaumont, Texas.]
I like small things, I like small moments that are almost elliptical, that are not necessarily linear; they’re natural things that happen in the world, but if you look at them from a slight angle there’s more than meets the eye.
Bruce Davidson
[Photographer, b. 1933, Oak Park, Illinois, lives in New York.]
I like discovery. I’m attracted to it. I like the feeling of going out, being at some place, looking in at something. Observation is important.
Ruth Bernhard
[Photographer, b. 1905, Berlin, d. 2006, San Francisco.]
After all these years, it is still the quality, the mood, the radiance of light which motivates me to work passionately, almost like an obsession.
André Kertész
[Photographer, b. 1894, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1985, New York.]
You do not have to imagine things; reality gives you all you need.
Gilles Peress
[Photographer, b. 1946, Neuilly, France, lives in New York.]
I think I’ve got a peculiar disease. I call it “the curse of history,” and it has to do with the fugitive absence/presence of both personal and collective memory. At first I thought it was a kind of personal illness, just related to time, private time, time that passes in one’s life. So I decided to
forget and throw myself into the
future.
Joel-Peter Witkin
[Photographer, b. 1939, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.]
My grandmother had only one leg and in the morning I would wake up and smell her gangrenous leg. Where most kids would wake up and smell coffee, I would wake up and smell grandmother’s rotting leg.
Robert Doisneau
[Photographer, b. 1912, Gentilly, Val-de-Marne, France, d. 1994, Montrouge, France.]
...there is the continual constraint of living everyday life to deal with. A kind of fury grows as a result because we are not really free. Then there comes a sort of slow boiling up inside so that finally we explode. Then, abruptly, there is that exasperation that at one moment translates itself into a need to be filled with wonder, a need for a kind of happiness of the eye and a need to look with intensity and with courage.
