Paul Theroux
[Writer, b. 1941, Medford, Massachusetts, lives in Cape Cod, Massachusetts and Haleiwa, Hawaii.]
“I’ve never seen Marilyn like that before,” a critic once said to me. “That’s not Marilyn,” I said. “It’s a picture.”
Oliviero Toscani
[Photography, b. 1942, Milan, Italy, lives in Casale Marittimo, Tuscany, Italy.]
A photograph permits a first viewing, and then an individual reflection. It solicits participation, and encourages individuality in interpretation. Television is an autarchy, a dictatorship.
Wolfgang Tillmans
[Photographer, b. 1968, Remscheid, Germany, lives in London.]
I think it’s much more radical to see and show things as they look instead of making them somehow subversive through alienation or estrangement.
Arthur Tress
[Photographer, b. 1940, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Cambria, California.]
I believe it is the photographer’s function to reveal that which is concealed, even if it be repugnant to the majority, not merely to record what we see around us.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
[Poet, b. 1809, Somersby, Lincolnshire, England, d. 1892, Aldwort, England.]
I can’t be anonymous by reason of your confounded photographs.
(To Julia Margaret Cameron)
Peter Turnley
[Photographer, b. 1955, Fort Wayne, Indiana, lives in New York and Paris.]
Photographers do themselves a disservice by talking too much about the equipment they use. Consequently people don’t take them seriously as creators in their own right. When people talk to writers about their work, they ask about their ideas and inspirations. When they talk to photographers, they ask about what cameras or film they use. That’s wrong—as wrong as asking a writer what pencil and laptop he uses.
Florence Thompson
[Migrant mother, b. 1904, Oklahoma, d. 1983, Scotts Valley, California.]
That’s my picture hanging all over the world, but I can’t get a penny out of it. What good’s it doing me?
(Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother at 75 years of age living in a trailer park near where the famous photograph was taken and surviving on $331.60 monthly social security.)
John Tagg
[Writer, theorist, and photohistorian, b. 1949, North Shields, England, lives in Ithica, New York.]
There is something morbid about looking at pictures, something frigid, and something furtive. We shuffle from one image to the next like buyers of old books. Once I imagined a collective looking, arguing out aloud. But the exhibiting institutions allow no space for such a practice. Now, like the other johns, I move from one picture to another, alone.
