Henry Holmes Smith
[Artist and teacher, b. 1909, Bloomington, Illinois, d. 1986, San Rafael, California.]
I think control is the wrong word. I would put it this way. You see a lovely girl across a crowded room and you walk toward her with hope in your mind. That’s the way [my] pictures are made.
Gilles Peress
[Photographer, b. 1946, Neuilly, France, lives in New York.]
I don’t trust words. I trust pictures.
Luc Delahaye
[Photographer, b. 1962, Tours, France, lives in Paris.]
What you want to be is a poet…. To voice the real and at the same time create an image that is a world in itself, with its own coherence, its autonomy and sovereignty; an image that thinks.
Robert Morris
[Artist and theorist, b. 1931, Kansas City, Missouri, lives in New York.]
There is probably no defense against the malevolent powers of the photograph to convert every visible aspect of the world into a static, consumable image.
Harold Edgerton
[Scientist, inventor, and photographer, b. 1903, Fremont, Nebraska, d. 1990, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
In many ways, unexpected results are what have most inspired my photography.
Berenice Abbott
[Photographer, writer, teacher, b. 1898, Springfield, Ohio, d. 1991, Monson, Maine.]
I’m not a nice girl; I’m a photographer. (On being told by a Federal Art Project official, after she photographed the Bowery, that “a nice girl should not go into such neighborhoods”)
Edmundo Desnoes
[Writer, b. 1930, Havana, Cuba, lives in New York.]
Photography has fooled the world. There’s no more convincing fraud. Its images are nothing but the expression of the invisible man working behind the camera. They are not reality, they form part of the language of culture.
Hunter Thompson
[Writer, b. 1937, Louisville, Kentucky, d. 2005, Woody Creek, Colorado.]
These horrifying digital snapshots of the American dream in action on foreign soil are worse than anything even I could have expected. I have been in this business a long time and I have seen many staggering things, but this one is over the line. Now I am really ashamed to carry an American passport.
(On photographs of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq)