Sally Mann
[Photographer, b. 1951, Lexington, Virginia, lives in Lexington.]
The fact is that these are not my children; they are figures on silvery paper slivered out of time. They represent my children at a fraction of a second on one particular afternoon with infinite variables of light, expression, posture, muscle tension, mood, wind and shade. These are not my children at all; these are children in a photograph.
Edward Weston
[Photographer, b. 1886, Highland Park, Illinois, d. 1958, Wildcat Hill, California.]
A photograph has no value unless it looks exactly like a photograph and nothing else.
Allan Sekula
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1951, Erie, Pennsylvania, d. 2013, Los Angeles.]
The photograph is an “incomplete” utterance, a message that depends on some external matrix of conditions and presuppositions for its readability.
Paolo Roversi
[Photographer, b. 1947, Ravenna, Italy, lives in Paris.]
My life is full of pictures I didn’t take, or that I just took with my mind because I wasn’t fast enough with the camera.
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.
Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Photographs may be
taken—but we are also taken in
by them.
Robert Doisneau
[Photographer, b. 1912, Gentilly, Val-de-Marne, France, d. 1994, Montrouge, France.]
The best photos, the ones that are remembered, are the ones that have first passed through the person’s mind before being restored by the camera.
Joachim Schmid
[Photographer and "professional looker", b. 1955, Balingen, Germany, lives in Berlin.]
I think there are no meaningful images. Meanings are created outside of the image.
