Henry Holmes Smith
[Artist and teacher, b. 1909, Bloomington, Illinois, d. 1986, San Rafael, California.]
I think control is the wrong word. I would put it this way. You see a lovely girl across a crowded room and you walk toward her with hope in your mind. That’s the way [my] pictures are made.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
I’m not responsible for my photographs. Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. It’s drowning yourself, dissolving yourself and then sniff, sniff, sniff—being sensitive to coincidence. You can’t go looking for it; you can’t want it, or you won’t get it. First you must lose your self. Then it happens.
[Photography] can be like a passionate kiss, but also like a gunshot or a psychoanalyst’s couch.
Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.?
Brian Duffy
[Photographer, b. 1933, London, d. 2010, London.]
Photography was dead by 1972. Everything had been resolved between 1839 and 1972. Every picture after ‘72, I have seen pre-‘72. Nothing new. But it took me some time to detect its death. The first person who twigged was Henri Cartier-Bresson. He just stopped—and started painting and drawing. God, he was useless.
James Agee
[Writer, b. 1909, Knoxville, Tennessee, d. 1955, New York.]
Walker [Evans] setting up the terrible structure of the tripod crested by the black square heavy head, dangerous as that of a hunchback, of the camera; stooping beneath cloak and cloud of wicked cloth, and twisting buttons; a witchcraft preparing, colder than keenest ice, and incalculably cruel.
(On Walker Evans photographing three tenant farmer families in Hale County, Alabama, 1936)
Anton Corbijn
[Photographer, b. 1955, Strijen, Netherlands, lives in London.]
The blurriness and the grain that I use, for me, is close to life. I find things that are very static and very sharp and very well-lit and all that is not how I experience life.
Robert Capa (Endre Ern? Friedmann)
[Photographer, b. 1913, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1954, Thai Binh, Vietnam.]
The war is like an actress who is getting old. It’s less and less photogenic and more and more dangerous.
(1944)
