Dorothea Lange
[Photographer, b. 1895, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1965, San Francisco.]

 This benefit of seeing... can come only if you pause a while, extricate yourself from the maddening mob of quick impressions ceaselessly battering our lives, and look thoughtfully at a quiet image... the viewer must be willing to pause, to look again, to meditate. 

Robert Capa (Endre Ern? Friedmann)
[Photographer, b. 1913, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1954, Thai Binh, Vietnam.]

 You don’t have to pose your camera. The pictures are there, and you just take them. The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda. (On the Spanish Civil War, 1937) 

James Balog
[Photographer, b. 1952, lives in Boulder, Colorado.]

 In some cases, I allow the edge of the set, the edge of my own artificial, artistic imposition, to show up because I don’t want to hide from that. I want to acknowledge that there is a living human and a living eye and a living mind and a living heart responding to what’s going on out there. 

Edouard Boubat
[Photographer, b. 1923, Paris, France, d. 1999, Paris.]

 All my photographs are about meetings and about coups de foudre—love at first sight. To do that type of photography, one must wipe the canvas clean to prepare for chance encounters, be open and aware to such moments, otherwise it becomes a cliché—already seen and expected. 

André Kertész
[Photographer, b. 1894, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1985, New York.]

 Look, if you want to learn how to write, you study the alphabet and exercise every day. And in the end you have a very beautiful alphabet. But what are you expressing with the alphabet? Perfect technique but expressing nothing. This is what I call “calligraphic photographs á l’americaine.” 

Gregory Crewdson
[Photographer, b. 1962, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New Haven Connecticut.]

 What I’m after, what I’ve always been after is a picture that tells a story. I see it all in my head beforehand, and I set out obsessively—maybe even narcissistically—to make it. Very little is improvised in the end, though I am open to serendipity in some details. In part I see what I am doing as exploring the American psyche through the American vernacular landscape, much as Hopper did. 

Beat Streuli
[Photographer and visual artist, b. 1957, Altdorf, Switzerland, lives in Zurich and Brussels.]

 I like to be flexible in the way I take pictures. I do not use a tripod, and I move around in the crowd, of which I am myself part.... I try to preserve the dynamics of the street, and my way of using the camera tries to approximate as much as possible the way we see: focusing on details, opening up to wider angles, and composing all these very short, fragmented impressions into a larger mental picture. 

Christopher Isherwood
[b. 1904, Disley, Cheshire, England, d. 1986, Santa Monica, California.]

 I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording—not thinking... Someday all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed. 
quotes 569-576 of 579
first page previous page page 72 of 73 next page last page
display quotes