Robert Frank
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1924, Zürich, Switzerland, lives in Mabou, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, and New York.]
I guess I got where I wanted to get, but it didn’t turn out to be the place I hoped it would be. I’m an outsider, still.
José Saramago
[Writer, b. 1922, Azinhaga, Portugal, d. 2010, Tias, Las Palmas, Spain.]
old photographs are very deceiving, they give us the illusion that we are alive in them, and it’s not true, the person we are looking at no longer exists, and if that person could see us, he or she would not recognise him—or herself in us, ‘Who’s that looking at me so sadly,’ he or she would say.
John Coplans
[Artist, critic, and curator, b. 1920, London, d. 2003, New York.]
I have the feeling that I’m alive, I have a body. I’m seventy years old, and generally bodies of seventy-year-old men look somewhat like mine. It’s a neglected subject matter. If I accept the cultural situation, I’m a dead man. So I’m using my body and saying, even though it’s a seventy-year-old body, I can make it extremely interesting. That keeps me alive and gives me vitality. It’s a kind of process of energizing myself by belief that the classical tradition of art that we’ve inherited from the Greeks is a load of bullshit.
Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]
In response to the question, “What's new?” we can answer with conviction that photography is new. We can make this claim not because it was invented rather recently, and not primarily because of photography’s changing technology (there are forms of art with more advanced hardware), but because photography is by its nature forced toward doing the old job of art—of discovering and revealing meaning from within the confusing detail of life.
Gabriel Orozco
[Artist, b. 1962, Jalapa, Veracruz, Mexico, lives in New York, Paris, and Mexico City.]
We normally consider stability to be the constant in life and accidents to be the exception, but it’s exactly the opposite. In reality, the accident is the rule and stability is the exception.
Andrea Modica
[Photographer, b. 1960, Oneonta, New York, lives in Manitou Springs, Colorado.]
I feel very lucky. I don’t know what else there has to be. I’m happy, as corny as it sounds, to be living in a place where it’s easy to live, easy to drive to the airport, easy to go pick up something at the supermarket and to have a circle of friends. Those were my goals in 1998, not to be queen of photography but to make a cultural adjustment to the West. And those are still more important goals to me than professional ones right now.
Dieter Appelt
[Photographer and artist, b. 1935, Niemegk, Germany, lives in Berlin.]
A snapshot steals life that it cannot return. A long exposure gives a form that never existed.
Alfred Stieglitz
[Photographer and curator, b. 1864, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1946, New York.]
My photographs do not lend themselves to reproduction. The very qualities that give them their life would be completely lost in reproduction. The quality of
touch in its deepest living sense is inherent in my photographs. When that sense of touch is lost, the heartbeat of the photograph is extinct—dead. My interest is in the living. That is why I cannot give permission to reproduce my photographs.
