Martin Schoeller
[Photographer, b. 1968, Munich, Germany, lives in New York.]

 Get off your phones and computers—they don’t take good pictures…. Original ideas come from experiences and the people around you. 

Jean Paul Sartre
[Writer and philosopher, b. 1905, Paris, d. 1980, Paris.]

 Photographs are not ideas. They give us ideas. 

Joel Sternfeld
[Photographer, b. 1944, New York, lives in New York.]

 No individual photo explains anything. That’s what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium. It is the photographer’s job to get this medium to say what you need it to say. Because photography has a certain verisimilitude, it has gained a currency as truthful—but photographs have always been convincing lies. 

Richard Serra
[Artist, b. 1939, San Francisco, lives in New York and Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada.]

 Most photographs take their cues from advertising, where the priority is high image content for an easy Gestalt reading. 

David Salle
[Artist, b. 1952, Norman, Oklahoma, lives in New York and Bridgehampton, Long Island.]

 The pictures present an improvised view of life as normal. Life is shown as we think we see it but in fact never do. The pictures imitate life to find a way out. 

José Saramago
[Writer, b. 1922, Azinhaga, Portugal, d. 2010, Tias, Las Palmas, Spain.]

 old photographs are very deceiving, they give us the illusion that we are alive in them, and it’s not true, the person we are looking at no longer exists, and if that person could see us, he or she would not recognise him—or herself in us, ‘Who’s that looking at me so sadly,’ he or she would say. 

August Sander
[Photographer, b. 1876, Herdorf, Germany, d. 1964, Cologne.]

 ... mortification is basic to the act of photographing. The person is mobile, ... then I freeze one moment in his movement, a mere five-hundredth of a second of that person’s life-time. That’s a very meager or small extract from a life. 

Sebastião Salgado
[Photographer, b. 1944, Aimores, Minas Gerias, Brazil, lives in Paris and Brazil.]

 You photograph with all your ideology.