Gilles Peress
[Photographer, b. 1946, Neuilly, France, lives in New York.]
I don’t trust words. I trust pictures.
Secondo Pia
[Lawyer and amateur photographer, b. 1855, Asti, Italy, d. 1941, Milan.]
Shut up in my darkroom all intent on my work, I experienced a very strong emotion when, during the development, I saw for the first time the Holy Face appear on the plate, with such clarity that I was dumbfounded by it.
(On his 1898 photograph which highlighted the alleged face in what is known as “the Shroud of Turin.”)
Gordon Parks
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1912, Fort Scott, Kansas, d. 2006, New York.]
If you don’t have anything to say, your photographs are not going to say much.
Jayne Anne Phillips
[Writer, b. 1952, Buckhannon, West Virginia, lives in Boston, Massachusetts.]
We take language into our minds; we read words in the same internal voice with which we think, remember, pray. But when we look at paintings or photographs, the reverse is true. If the image corresponds to our most intensely personal, yet archetypal, yearnings and memories, we don’t take the image in, we move out of ourselves into the image, as though it were another world, a hologram whose forms of light are ghostly angels, or a dream whose physical reality is suggested by what we see on the surface of a canvas or a page. We connect with the image as though we had lost it within our own memories and are now surprised to find it represented outside ourselves, vital and luminous, charged with energy.
Platon (Platon Rivellis)
[Photographer, b. 1968, London, lives in New York.]
When I was shooting Karl Rove, I said to him, “Mr. Rove, I’m just a guy from England trying to make it in America. Can you give me any advice?” and he said to me, “Sonny, if you’re shooting me, you’ve already made it.”
Tim Page
[Photographer, b. 1944, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, lives in Brisbane, Australia.]
Every good war picture becomes an anti-war picture.
Marcel Proust
[Writer, b. 1871, Auteuil, Paris, d. 1922, Paris.]
How paradoxical it is to search reality for the pictures that are stored in one’s memory.
Richard Prince
[Artist, b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone, lives in New York.]
... maybe re-photographing a picture is like fucking a picture. There is something sexual about standing behind a camera and staring at another picture. It’s hard to explain. It’s like you’ve captured it. Even before you’ve taken it. Before you press the shutter.
