Inez Van Lamsweerde
[Photographer, b. 1963, Amsterdam, Netherlands, lives in Amsterdam.]
My works have nothing to do with reality. I am not interested in a version of daily reality. The works show a new mental world.
Julius Shulman
[Photographer, b. 1910, Brooklyn, New York, d. 2009, Los Angeles.]
I’m not modest about myself. I know for a fact that I am good. But good in the sense that I can put things together. I expound vociferously to students of architecture and photography, the significance of design. A photograph is a design in which you assemble thoughts in your mind.
Albert Camus
[Writer, b. 1913, Mondovi, Algeria, d. 1960, Sens, France.]
Thinking is not unifying or making the appearance familiar under the guise of a great principal. Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one’s consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.
Tibor Kalman
[Graphic designer, b. 1949, Budapest, d. 1999, Dorado, Puerto Rico.]
Could you blow this up really big and print it in the wrong color and tell everybody to go back to school and to remember that form ain’t worth shit anyway and that content ideas you big bunch of jerks rules make that part red or something ok?
Frank Gohlke
[Photographer, b. 1942, Wichita Falls, Texas, lives in Southborough, Massachusetts.]
I see the experience of pictures as a kind of cycle, a kind of circular motion in which you’re in the world, then you enter the picture and you’re in a different world (it’s not the same as the one you live in, but recognizable as one you might live in). And then you’re returned to your world with an enlarged sense of its possibilities.
Jeff Wall
[Photographer, b. 1946, Vancouver, Canada, lives in Vancouver.]
Photography could emerge socially as art only at the moment when its aesthetic presuppositions seemed to be undergoing a withering radical critique, a critique apparently aimed at foreclosing any further aestheticization of “artification” of the medium. Photoconceptualism led the way toward the complete acceptance of photography as art—autonomous, bourgeois, collectible art—by virtue of insisting that this medium might be privileged to the negation of that whole idea.
Harry Callahan
[Photographer, b. 1912, Detroit, Michigan, d. 1999, Atlanta, Georgia.]
It takes me a long time to change. I don’t think you can just go out and figure out a bunch of visual ideas and photograph. The change happens in living and not through thinking.
John Baldessari
[Artist, b. 1931, National City, California, lives in Venice, California.]
The real reason I got deeply interested in photography was my sense of dissatisfaction with what I was seeing. I wanted to break down the rules of photography—the conventions. I discovered I was more of a “thinking” person than a “working” person. Photography allowed me to register my ideas more rapidly than painting them. They grew out of a sense of urgency. If you’re stranded on a desert island and a plane flew over, you wouldn’t write “HELP” in Old English script.
