Sigmund Freud
[Neurologist, psychoanalyst, and thinker, b. 1856, Freiberg, Moravia, Austrian Empire (now Príbor, Czechoslovakia), d. 1939, London, England.]
[The child receives impressions like] a photographic exposure that can be developed after any interval of time and transformed into a picture.
Horst Faas
[Photojournalist, b. 1933, Berlin, Germany, d. 2012, Munich, Germany.]
I think the best war photos I have taken have always been made when a battle was actually taking place—when people were confused and scared and courageous and stupid and showed all these things. When you look at people right at the very moment of truth, everything is quite human. You take a picture at this moment with all the mistakes in it, with everything that might be confusing to the reader, but that’s the right combat photo.
Harold Feinstein
[Photographer, b. 1931, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New York.]
On one hand you want to see your subject well. On the other hand, you want to be caught off guard to retain the spontaneity. If you know your subject too well you stop seeing it.
Adam Fuss
[Photographer, b. 1961, London, lives in New York.]
An echo is a good way to describe the photogram, which is a visual echo of the real object. That's why I like to work with the photogram, because the contact with what is represented is actual. It's as if the border between the world and the print is osmotic.
Federico Fellini
[Filmmaker, b. 1920, Rimini, Italy, d. 1993, Rome.]
There is no such thing as a good paparazzo. A good paparazzo, that’s a paparazzo who has had his camera broken. In fact, they are bandits, thieves of photography.
(Statement after photographs were published showing Jackie Onassis sunbathing nude.)
Lee Friedlander
[Photographer, b. 1934, Aberdeen, Washington, lives in New York.]
With a camera like that [a Leica 35mm rangefinder] you don’t believe you’re in the masterpiece business. It’s enough to be able to peck at the world.
Joan Fontcuberta
[Photographer, b. 1955, Barcelona, lives in Barcelona.]
Every photograph is a fiction with pretensions to truth. Despite everything that we have been inculcated, all that we believe, photography always lies; it lies instinctively, lies because its nature does not allow it to do anything else.
Francis Frith
[Photographer, b. 1822, Chesterfield, Derbyshire, England, d. 1898, Cannes, France.]
A photographer only knows—he only can appreciate the difficulty of getting a view satisfactorily into the camera: foregrounds are especially perverse; distance too near or too far; the falling away of the ground; the intervention of some brick wall or other commonplace object, which an artist would simply omit; some or all of these things, (with plenty others of a similar character) are the rule, not the exception.
(1858)