Rondal Partridge
[Photographer, b. 1917, San Francisco, d. 2015, Berkeley, California.]
Ansel [Adams] always jumped over the fence to photograph, walked past the garbage. He always looked to get an immaculate view, and I spent my life stepping back to include the garbage in my photographic view.
Weegee (Usher Fellig)
[Photographer, b. 1899, Zlothew near Lemberg, Austrian Galicia (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), d. 1968, New York.]
It’s been a strange [summer].... I was sent by a magazine to photograph famous photographers.... Of course, I included myself.
(To Peter Sellers on the set of Dr. Strangelove,
1963)
William Klein
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, lives in Paris.]
I think there are two kinds of photography—Jewish photography and goyish photography. If you look at modern photography, you will find, on the one hand the Weegees, the Diane Arbuses, the Robert Franks—funky photographs. And then you have the people who go out in the woods. Ansel Adams, Weston. It’s like black and white jazz.
Hilla Becher
[Photographer, b. 1934, Potsdam, d. 2015, Düsseldorf.]
There are stillborn topics, where its apparent that the subject won't lead very far, because its not historically founded or is not anchored in the present or has been previously done. Think of the Cindy Sherman syndrome.
Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
I was living in Monterey, a place where the classic photographers—the Westons, Wynn Bullock and Ansel Adams—came for a privileged view of nature. But my daily life very rarely took me to Point Lobos or Yosemite; it took me to shopping centers, and gas stations and all the other unhealthy growth that flourished beside the highway. It was a landscape that no one else had much interest in looking at. Other than me.
Brassaï (Gyula Halász)
[Photographer, b. 1889, Brassó, Transylvania, Hungary (now Romania), d. 1984, Eze, Alpes-Maritimes, France.]
... we photographers are nothing but a pack of crooks, thieves and voyeurs. We are to be found everywhere we are not wanted; we betray secrets that were never entrusted to us; we spy shamelessly on things that are not our business; And end up the hoarders of a vast quantity of stolen goods.
Jeff Wall
[Photographer, b. 1946, Vancouver, Canada, lives in Vancouver.]
Only an idiot would take pictures of nothing but filling stations.
(Referring to Ed Ruscha’s seminal 1963 book “Twentysix Gasoline Stations.”)
Ansel Adams
[Photographer, b. 1902, San Francisco, d. 1984, Carmel, California.]
Those people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on the old dry plates of sixty years ago... I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. And they in turn seem to be aware of me.
(On photographs by Jacob Riis)
