Margaret Bourke-White
[Photographer, b. 1904, New York, d. 1971, Darien, Connecticut.]
Saturate yourself with your subject and the camera will all but take you by the hand.
Jean Baudrillard
[Writer and theorist, b. 1929, Reims, France, d. 2007, Paris.]
You think you photograph a particular scene for the pleasure it gives. In fact it’s the scene that wants to be photographed. You’re merely an extra in the production.
William Henry Fox Talbot
[Mathematician and pioneer of photography, b. 1800, Melbury, Dorset, England, d. 1877, Lacock Abbey, England.]
…[the camera] chronicles whatever it sees, and certainly would delineate a chimney-pot or a chimney-sweeper with the same impartiality as it would the Apollo of Belvedere.
Frank Gohlke
[Photographer, b. 1942, Wichita Falls, Texas, lives in Southborough, Massachusetts.]
When a photographer chooses a subject, he or she is making a claim on the interest and attention of future viewers, a prediction about what will be thought to have been important.
Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Let the subject generate its own photographs. Become a camera.
Michael Snow
[Filmmaker, photographer, and artist, b. 1929, Toronto, Canada, lives in Toronto.]
To extend the depth of what has been called ‘art’ into photography requires... making available to the spectator the amazing transformations the subject undergoes to become the photograph.
Slim Aarons
[Photographer, b. 1916, New York, d. 2006, Montrose, New York.]
Photographing attractive people who were doing attractive things in attractive places.
(Summary of his photographic career)
Barbara Ess
[Photographer, b. 1948, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New York.]
I try to photograph what can’t be photographed—psychological or subjective reality, which seems more real than physical or consensual reality.
