Francesca Woodman
[Photographer, b. 1958, Denver, Colorado, d. 1981, New York.]
Things looked funny because my pictures depend on an emotional state... I know this is true and I thought about this for a long time. Somehow it made me feel very, very good.
Weegee (Usher Fellig)
[Photographer, b. 1899, Zlothew near Lemberg, Austrian Galicia (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), d. 1968, New York.]
There are photographic fanatics, just as there are religious fanatics. They buy a so-called candid camera... there is no such thing: it’s the photographer who has to be candid, not the camera.
Otto Wöhler
[Military leader, b. 1894, Burgwedel, Germany, d. 1987, Burgwedel.]
No photographs will be made of such abominable excesses and no report of them will be given in letters home. The production and the distribution of such photographs and reports on such incidents are looked upon as undermining the decency and discipline in the armed forces and will be severely punished. All existing photographs and reports on such excesses are to be confiscated together with the negatives and are to be sent to the Ic counterintelligence officer of the army giving the name of the producer or distributor.
(July 1941 order to German 11th Army troops operating on the eastern front with holocaust killing squad Einsatzgruppe D, 1941)
Tennessee Williams
[Writer, b. 1911, Columbus, Mississippi, d. 1983, New York.]
Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.
Wim Wenders
[Artist and filmmaker, b. 1945, Düsseldorf, lives in Berlin.]
An image that is unseen can’t sell anything. It is pure, therefore true, beautiful, in one word: innocent. As long as no eye contaminates it, it is in perfect unison with the world. If it is not seen, the image and the object it represents belong together.
Eudora Welty
[Writer, b. 1909, Jackson, Mississippi, d. 2001, Jackson.]
I learned quickly enough when to click the shutter, but what I was becoming aware of more slowly was a story-writer’s truth: The thing to wait on, to reach for, is the moment in which people reveal themselves... I learned from my own pictures, one by one, and had to; for I think we are the breakers of our own hearts.
Charis Wilson
[Model, b. 1914, San Francisco, d. 2009, Santa Cruz, California.]
I knew I really didn’t look that good, and that Edward [Weston] had glorified me, but it was a very pleasant thing to be glorified and I couldn’t wait to go back for more.
Jeff Wall
[Photographer, b. 1946, Vancouver, Canada, lives in Vancouver.]
A picture is something that makes invisible its before and after.