Burke Uzzle
[Photographer, b. 1938, Raleigh, North Carolina, lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.]

 After all these years of wandering around as a street photographer and a journalist, I decided that this world is such a curious, screwed up place so full of contradictions... that I couldn’t look at it any more in the raw form without trying to find some way of balancing it in a more philosophical context—less in a reportorial manner and more in an artistic one. 

Anna Atkins
[Photographer, b. 1799, Tunbridge, Kent, England, d. 1871, Halstead, Essex, England.]

 The difficulty of making accurate drawings of objects so minute as many of the Algae and Confervae has induced me to avail myself of Sir John Herschel’s beautiful process of Cyanotype, to obtain impressions of the plants themselves, which I have much pleasure in offering to my botanical friends. (1843, text accompanying the first photographically illustrated book, British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, authored by the Atkins, recognized as the first female photographer.) 

Joel-Peter Witkin
[Photographer, b. 1939, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.]

 My first conscious recollection was when I was 6 years old. It happened on a Sunday when my mother was escorting my twin brother and me down the steps of the tenement where we lived. We were going to church. While walking through the hallway to the entrance of the building, we heard an incredible crash mixed with screaming and cries for help. The accident had involved three cars, all with families in them. Somehow, in the confusion, I was no longer holding my mother’s hand. At the place where I stood at the curb, I could see something rolling from one of the overturned cars. It stopped at the curb where I stood. It was the head of a little girl. I bent down to touch the face, to ask it—but before I could touch it—someone carried me away. 

Wynn Bullock
[Photographer, b. 1902, Chicago, Illinois, d. 1975, Monterey, California.]

 Mysteries lie all around us, even in the most familiar things, waiting only to be perceived. 

Art Sinsabaugh
[Photographer, b. 1924, Irvington, New Jersey, d. 1983, Chicago, Illinois.]

 At some point I became aware of the unbelievable infinite detail on the horizon; this is what drew my attention. So I set about to pursue the distant horizon. 

Alfred Stieglitz
[Photographer and curator, b. 1864, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1946, New York.]

 My photographs look like photographs—and in [the] eyes [of pictorial photographers] they therefore can’t be art... My aim is increasingly to make my photographs look so much like photographs that unless one has eyes and sees, they won’t be seen—and still everyone will never forget having once looked at them. (1923) 

Clarence John Laughlin
[Photographer, b. 1905, Lake Charles, Louisiana, d. 1985, New Orleans, Louisiana.]

 In all my work I have been animated with three convictions: 1) that there is no essential reason why the creative imagination cannot work with a ray of light acting upon a sensitized surface as effectively as it can with a brush laden with pigment, 2) that photography is one of the most authentic and integral modes of expression possible in the particular kind of world in which we live, [and] 3) that in photography, as in the other arts, the quality of a man's imagination is the only thing that counts—technique and technical proficiency mean nothing in themselves. 

Ray Metzker
[Photographer, b. 1931, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, d. 2014, Philadelphia.]

 I am not an objective reporter. I prefer to go further, to the unstated things of our existence. What I can’t understand and grasp seems to lead me. 
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