George Bernard Shaw
[Writer, critic, and dramatist, b. 1856, Dublin, d. 1950, Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire, England.]
The photographer is like the cod, which lays a million eggs in order that one may be hatched.
Anders Petersen
[Photographer, b. 1944, Solna, Sweden, lives in Stockholm.]
I don’t care so much about form. Perhaps I did in the beginning, a long time ago. But now I just want to be as straight and simple and as true as possible.
Jacques-Henri Lartigue
[Photographer, b. 1894, Courbevoie, France, d. 1986, Nice, France.]
The golden rule is “work fast.” As for framing, composition, focus—this is no time to start asking yourself questions: you just have to trust your intuition and the sharpness of your reflexes.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
The camera can be a machine gun, a warm kiss, a sketchbook. Shooting a camera is like saying, “Yes, yes, yes.” There is no “maybe.” All the “maybes” should go in the trash.
Douglas Huebler
[Photographer and artist, b. 1924, Ann Arbor, Michigan, d. 1997, Truro, Massachusetts.]
I use the camera as a “dumb” copying device that only serves to document whatever phenomenon appears before it through the conditions set by a system. No “esthetic” choices are possible. Other people often make the photographs. It makes no difference.
Anton Corbijn
[Photographer, b. 1955, Strijen, Netherlands, lives in London.]
I don’t crop my images and I always shoot handheld. By doing that I build in a kind of imperfection and this helps to emphasize reality.
Alfred Stieglitz
[Photographer and curator, b. 1864, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1946, New York.]
My own camera is of the simplest pattern and has never left me in the lurch, although it has had some tough handling in wind and storm… a shutter working at a speed of one-fourth to one-twenty-fifth of a second will answer all purposes. Microscopic sharpness is of no pictorial value.
(1897)
Sally Mann
[Photographer, b. 1951, Lexington, Virginia, lives in Lexington.]
The hardest part is setting the camera on the tripod, or making the decision to bring the camera out of the car, or just raising the camera to your face, believing, by those actions, that whatever you find before you,
whatever you find there, is going to be good.
