George Carlin
[Comedian and social critic, b. 1937, New York, d. 2008, Santa Monica, California.]

 I don’t own a camera, so I travel with a police sketch artist. 

William Claxton
[Photographer, b. 1927, Pasadena, California, d. 2008, Los Angeles.]

 … jazz and photography have always come together for me. They’re alike in their improvisation and their spontaneousness. 

Paul Caponigro
[Photographer, b. 1932, Boston, Massachusetts, lives in Cushing, Maine.]

 We always point the lens both outward and inward. 

Ernest Cole (Ernest Levi Tsoloane Kole)
[Photographer, chronicler of Apartheid, b. 1940, Eersterust, South Africa, d. 1990, New York.]

 Cole
Photographer
(Total inscription on the stone slab covering Cole’s grave at Mamelodi cemetery, Tshwane, South Africa.)  

Harry Callahan
[Photographer, b. 1912, Detroit, Michigan, d. 1999, Atlanta, Georgia.]

 I think what photography can do really well is allow you to make a life’s work… So theoretically—the series is first, then the group is next, and the whole life’s work is the grand finale. (1979) 

Teilhard De Chardin
[Theologian, b. 1881, Auvergne, France, d. 1955, New York.]

 It often happens that what stares us in the face is the most difficult to perceive. 

John Currin
[Artist, b. 1962, Boulder, Colorado, lives in New York.]

 I’ve always found paintings of nudes depressing because they can’t compete with photographs. The grainiest photograph of some girl, a blurry Polaroid—you’d rather look at that than the Venus de Milo, because you think, “Wow, that’s really somebody... This camera really was in front of this real naked lady.” 

Italo Calvino
[Writer, b. 1923, Santiago de la Vegas, Cuba, d. 1985, Siena, Italy.]

 Whatever person you decide to photograph, or whatever thing, you must go on photographing it always, exclusively, at every hour of the day and night.