Cindy Sherman
[Artist, b. 1954, Glen Ridge, New Jersey, lives in New York.]
One reason I was interested in photography was to get away from the preciousness of the art object.
David LaChapelle
[Photographer, b. 1968, Connecticut, lives in New York.]
My biggest advice would be to take the pictures you want to take. Don’t think about the marketplace, what sells, or what an editor might say. And don’t think about style. It’s all bullshit and surface stuff.
Harold Evans
[Writer and editor, b. 1928, Manchester, England, lives in New York.]
People were murdered for the camera; and some photographers and a television camera crew departed without taking a picture in the hope that in the absence of cameramen acts might not be committed. Others felt that the mob was beyond appeal to mercy. They stayed and won Pulitzer Prizes. Were they right?
Richard Prince
[Artist, b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone, lives in New York.]
I got a job in the tear-sheets department, ripping up magazines like People, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and Time, and delivering the editorial pages.... So I began to use a camera to make fake photographs of the ads. By re-photographing a magazine page and then developing the film in a cheap lab, the photos came out very strange.
Brian Duffy
[Photographer, b. 1933, London, d. 2010, London.]
I thought, Gawd this looks dead easy compared to the drawing lark. I’ll give this a whiz. Take up photography as an easy way to make money. Just my sort of thing—women, gadgets, clothes—I must have a go at it.
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
[Writer, b. 1835, Hannibal, Missouri, d. 1910, Redding, Connecticut.]
The [Kodak is] the only witness I have encountered in my long experience that I couldn’t bribe.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
[Photography as] a career?! It’s for a prime minister or an entrepreneur or a funeral director.
That’s a career.
Mark Klett
[Photographer, b. 1952, Albany, New York, lives in Tempe, Arizona.]
Fine-art photography is a very small world associated with galleries, museums, and university art programs. It’s not like rock music; the products of this world have never been widely seen because the artists are often exploring things that are not already coded in general consciousness. It’s not that photographers don’t want to be famous, it’s just that very few of the views from the edges of culture make the mainstream. Ansel Adams was an exception.
