Harry Benson
[Photographer, b. 1929, Glasgow, Scotland, lives in New York.]
I was next to Bobby [Kennedy] when he was shot. It was hideous. Part of me wanted to crawl away. I couldn’t… I still wake up in the night and think about it. I even remember the f-stop. It was 1.4.
Alexey Brodovitch
[Graphic designer and art director, b. 1898, Ogolitchi, Russia, d. 1971, Le Thor, France.]
When you look into your camera, if you see an image you have ever seen before, don’t click the shutter.
Bill Brandt
[Photographer, b. 1904, Hamburg, Germany, d. 1983, London.]
It is part of the photographer’s job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep in him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time or of the traveler who enters a strange country.
David Byrne
[Musician and artist, b. 1952, Dumbarton, Scotland, lives in New York.]
Is giving in to the photographer’s presumably natural impulse to compose and light well sometimes okay and not okay other times?
André Bazin
[Film critic and theorist, b. 1918, Angers, France, d. 1958, Nogent-sur-Marne, Île-de-France, France.]
Photography can strip from the world that spiritual dust and grime with which our eyes have covered it.
Samuel Beckett
[Writer, b. 1906, Foxrock, Dublin, Ireland, d. 1989, Paris.]
I had seen faces in photographs I might have found beautiful had I known even vaguely in what beauty was supposed to consist. And my father’s face, on his death-bolster, had seemed to hint at some form of aesthetics relevant to man. But the faces of the living, all grimace and flush, can they be described as objects?
Christian Boltanski
[Artist, b. 1944, Paris, lives in Paris.]
We all die twice—once when we actually die and once when no one on earth recognizes our photograph.
Max Bense
[Philosopher and theoretician, b. 1910, Strasbourg, France, d. 1990, Stuttgart.]
Painting reveals itself more strongly as “source” art, and photography more strongly as a “channel” art.