Shomei Tomatsu
[Photographer, b. 1930, Nagoya, Japan, d. 2012, Okinawa, Japan.]
If I could, I would want to see everything: the affairs of others, the scene of a murder, the Pygmies in the African rain forest, the super-rich of Wall Street, the face of the man who stole three hundred million yen, the Sydney Opera House, the graveyard of ships in the Sargasso Sea, the tail of an orca, the plankton of the deep ocean, the inside of Prime Minister Sato’s belly, Mao Zedong, Mars, Cape Kennedy, Antarctic blizzards, the animal whose name is “sloth,” the pudendum of Marilyn Monroe. My eyes are infamously greedy:... to me, the stuff other photographers substitute for seeing is but a kind of pessimism.
Miroslav Tichý
[Photographer, b. 1926, Nětčice, Czechoslovakia, d. 2011, Kyjov, Czech Republic.]
Photography is painting with light! The blurs, the spots, those are errors! But the errors are part of it, they give it poetry and turn it into painting. And for that you need as bad a camera as possible!
William Thackeray
[Writer, b. 1811, Calcutta, India, d. 1863, London.]
The two most engaging powers of [a photographer] are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.
William Henry Fox Talbot
[Mathematician and pioneer of photography, b. 1800, Melbury, Dorset, England, d. 1877, Lacock Abbey, England.]
[The camera] may be said to make a picture of whatever it sees, the object glass is the eye of the instrument—the sensitive paper may be compared to the retina.
Henry David Thoreau
[Writer and practical philosopher, b. 1817, Concord, Massachusetts, d. 1862, Concord.]
The question is not what you look at, but what you see.
Peter Turnley
[Photographer, b. 1955, Fort Wayne, Indiana, lives in New York and Paris.]
The one thing that is always clear in my mind is that the people, and their stories, and the themes of life that I photograph are always more important to me than the process of photography itself.
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)
Donald Trump (Drumpf)
[Businessman, liar, huckster, politician, b. 1946, New York, lives in Washington, D.C..]
Be very careful, because in your hotel rooms and no matter where you go, you’re gonna probably have cameras.
(Advice, offered while denying the existence of photo documents of him performing outer edge sexual practices in a Russian hotel room.)
