Jack Welpott
[Photographer, b. 1923, Kansas City, Missouri, d. 2007, Greenbrae, California.]
I went through a long period when I thought my photographs were not visible—on the wall, but not visible.
Ronald Reagan
[Actor and politician, b. 1911, Tampico, Illinois, d. 2004, Bel Air, California.]
One picture is worth one-thousand denials.
Ron Galella
[Photographer, b. 1931, Bronx, New York, lives in New York.]
My job is thick with risks, threats, occasional violence and sometimes the necessary folly that sometimes courts humiliation and ridicule. But I don’t care. I see myself as the dean of American paparazzi.
Rosalind Krauss
[Writer, critic, and historian, b. 1941, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]
... photography is an imprint or transfer off the real; it is a photochemically processed trace causally connected to the thing in the world to which it refers in a manner parallel to fingerprints or footprints or the rings of water that cold glasses leave on tables. The photograph is thus generically distinct from painting or sculpture or drawing. On the family tree of images it is closer to palm prints, death masks, the Shroud of Turin, or the tracks of gulls on beaches.
Edward Said
[Writer and critic, b. 1935, Jerusalem, British-ruled Palestine, d. 2003, New York.]
But I do not know whether the photograph can, or does, say things as they really are. Something has been lost. But the representation is all we have.
David Hockney
[Artist, b. 1937, Bradford, England, lives in Bridlington, Yorkshire; London; and Los Angeles.]
I mean, photography is all right if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops—for a split second. But that's not what it’s like to live in the world, or to convey the experience of living in the world.
Nikki S. Lee
[Photographer, b. 1970, Kye-Chang, Korea, lives in New York.]
I don’t want to carry big things around with me. I’m lazy. The snapshot camera, you just carry it around and take the picture. You don’t need to think about anything. People in the street are not going to wait for you with a big camera. They would freak out. With a snapshot camera, they are comfortable.
Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
The camera is first a means of self-discovery and a means of self-growth. The artist has one thing to say—himself.