Simon Norfolk
[Photographer, b. 1963, Lagos, Nigeria, lives in Brighton, England.]
[My] pictures are about memory and forgetfulness. The evidence is dissolving. Bones crumble; human ash returns to soil; teeth, sandals, hair, bullets, axes disperse into atoms and molecules. Footprints in the snow will be erased by the next storm. The evidence of evil, like the evidence of good, obeys the universal laws of entropy. Heat cools, matter disintegrates, memories fade. If we let them.
Nancy Newhall
[Writer, curator, and historian, b. 1908, Lynn, Massachusetts, d. 1974, on the Snake River, Idaho.]
Perhaps the old literacy of words is dying and a new literacy of images is being born. Perhaps the printed page will disappear and even our records will be kept in images and sounds.
Graham Nash
[Musician, photographer, and collector, b. 1942, Blackpool, Lancashire, England, lives in Encino, California.]
I don’t shoot kittens with balls of wool. I don’t shoot sunsets. What draws me? Ironic, surreal, unexplained, timely moments.
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce
[One of the originators of photography, b. 1765, Chalon-sur-Saône, France, d. 1833, Gras, France.]
The discovery I have made and which I call Heliography, consists in reproducing spontaneously, by the action of light, with gradations of tints from black to white, the images received in the camera obscura.
Beaumont Newhall
[Photographer, writer, and historian, b. 1908, Lynn, Massachusetts, d. 1993, Santa Fe, New Mexico.]
We are not interested in the unusual, but in the usual seen unusually.
Friedrich Nietzsche
[Philosopher, b. 1844, Rocken, Prussia, d. 1900, Weimar, Germany.]
Artists should not see things as they are: they should see them fuller, simpler, stronger: To this end, however, a kind of youthfulness, of vernality, a sort of perpetual elation, must be peculiar to their lives.
(Copied by Edward Weston in his quotation file.)
Laurel Nakadate
[Video artist and photographer, b. 1975, Austin, Texas, lives in New York.]
Sometimes, photographs live in our hearts as unborn ghosts and we survive not because their shadows find permanence there, but because that thing that is larger than us, larger than the things we can point to, remember and claim, escorts us from dark into light...
Lennart Nilsson
[Photographer and scientist, b. 1922, Strangnas, Sweden, d. 2017, Stockholm.]
I want to reveal that which is close to us, that which is familiar, in a new way.