Jean Pigozzi
[Photographer, collector, and Fiat fortune heir, b. 1952, Paris, lives in Geneva.]
The moment when I press the shutter is fantastic, orgasmic, so charged with the hope that this will be a great, original, interesting, and perfectly composed photo. But like any other exciting thing in life, it is usually spoiled by some ridiculous, unpredictable, and annoying detail.
Pablo Picasso
[Artist, b. 1881, Málaga, Spain, d. 1973, Mougin, France.]
When you see what you express through photography, you realize all the things that can no longer be the objective of painting. Why should the artist persist in treating subjects that can be established so clearly with the lens of a camera?
Adrian Piper
[Artist, b. 1948, Harlem, New York, lives in Hyannis, Massachusetts.]
One reason for making and exhibiting a work is to induce a reaction or change in the viewer.... In this sense, the work as such is nonexistent except when it functions as a medium of change between the artist and viewer.
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.
Camille Paglia
[Writer, b. 1947, Endicott, New York, lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.]
I’ve often said the best pornographers were raised Catholic, which gives you an intense sense of taboo. I know I have it, as did Mapplethorpe and Warhol, and so does Madonna. Without taboo, you can’t get the supercharge of porn.
Marcel Proust
[Writer, b. 1871, Auteuil, Paris, d. 1922, Paris.]
Photography is the product of complete alienation.
Tod Papageorge
[Photographer, b. 1940, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, lives in New Haven, Connecticut.]
It’s unarguable to say that every one of us has been moved by the beauty of what I have called snapshots, but for photographers they are charms and proverbs, and like lightening or wild strawberries...
Sylvia Plachy
[Photographer, b. 1943, Budapest, Hungary, lives in New York.]
Every photo is almost a fiction or a dream. If it’s really good, it’s another form of life.
