Florence Thompson
[Migrant mother, b. 1904, Oklahoma, d. 1983, Scotts Valley, California.]
I wish she [Dorothea Lange] hadn’t taken my picture. I can’t get a penny out of it. She didn’t ask my name. She said she wouldn’t sell the pictures. She said she’d send me a copy. She never did.
(1978, on the 1936 photo of her titled Migrant Mother.
) 
Mark Getty
[Oil fortune heir, photo stock entrepreneur, b. 1960, Rome, lives in Buckinghamshire, Tuscany, and London.]
Intellectual property is the oil of the twenty-first century.
Subcommander Marcos (Rafael Sebastian Guillén Vicente)
[Professor and revolutionary, b. 1957, Tampico, Mexico, lives in Chiapas, Mexico.]
For me it is clear that photography prizes should be for those being photographed and not for the photographers.
Edward Steichen
[Photographer and curator, b. 1879, Luxembourg, Germany, d. 1973, West Redding, Connecticut.]
Over three and a half million people have seen the exhibit; a million copies of the book,
The Family of Man, have gone all over the world... This is irrefutable proof that photography is a universal language; that it speaks to all people; that people are hungry for that kind of language. They are hungry for pictures that have meaning, a meaning they can understand.
Werner Bischof
[Photographer, b. 1916, Zürich, Switzerland, d. 1954, Peña de Aguila, Peru.]
I am powerless against the great magazines—I am an artist, and I will always be that.
Albert Renger-Patzsch
[Artist, b. 1897, Würzburg, Bavaria, Germany, d. 1966, Wamel Dorf, Über Soest, West Germany.]
There was a time when one looked over one’s shoulder with an ironical smile at the photographer and when photography as a profession seemed almost invariably a target for ridicule. That time is now over.
Sandy Skoglund
[Photographer, b. 1946, Quincy, Massachusetts, lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.]
If you could see a photograph of what it took to make an advertising photograph—things you don’t think about, like the photo assistant carefully arranging the meatballs—the degree of unnaturalness would be astonishing. Yet it produces an image that looks natural, and is orchestrated to provoke basic emotional responses.
Jesse Helms
[Politician and U.S. senator, b. 1921, Monroe, North Carolina, d. 2008, Raleigh, North Carolina.]
I do not know Mr. Andres Serrano, and I hope I never meet him. Because he is not an artist, he is a jerk. Let us examine exactly what this bird did to get $15,000 of the taxpayers’ money through the so-called National Endowment for the Arts. If they have no more judgment than that, it ought to be abolished and all funds returned to the taxpayer. What this Serrano fellow did, he filled a bottle with his own urine and then stuck a crucifix down there—Jesus Christ on a cross. He set it up on a table and took a picture of it.
(1989)
