Platon (Platon Rivellis)
[Photographer, b. 1968, London, lives in New York.]
When I was shooting Karl Rove, I said to him, “Mr. Rove, I’m just a guy from England trying to make it in America. Can you give me any advice?” and he said to me, “Sonny, if you’re shooting me, you’ve already made it.”
Bill Cunningham
[Fashion photographer, b. 1929, Boston, Massachusetts, d. 2016, New York.]
You see, if you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do, kid. That’s the key to the whole thing. Don’t touch money.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.
Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
I saw a man lying on the steps of a church on Lex Ave under a sign saying
Open for Meditation and Prayer with his fly open and his penis out. I couldn’t ask him to sign a release. Could you?
(To her magazine editor)
Bill Owens
[Photographer, b. 1938, San Jose, California, lives in Hayward, California.]
I had no money. I couldn’t make a living. Then one day I found my Nikon under the seat of my car and I realized I wasn’t a photographer anymore.
Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
I do note that photography, a despised medium to work in, is full of empty phonies and worthless commercial people. That presents quite a challenge to the man who can take delight in being in a very difficult, disdained medium.
Allan Sekula
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1951, Erie, Pennsylvania, d. 2013, Los Angeles.]
As a privileged commodity fetish, as an object of connoisseurship, the photograph achieves its ultimate semantic poverty. But this poverty has haunted photographic practice from the very beginning.
Wim Wenders
[Artist and filmmaker, b. 1945, Düsseldorf, lives in Berlin.]
Images are no longer what they used to be. They can’t be trusted any more. We all know that. You know that. When we grew up, images were telling stories and showing them. Now they’re all into selling. They’ve changed under our very eyes. They don’t even know how to do it anymore. They’ve plain forgotten. Images are selling out the world. And at a big discount.
