Garry Winogrand
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, d. 1984, Tijuana, Mexico.]
A photo is a literary narrative, ya know what I mean... but it’s not specific.
Richard Misrach
[Photographer, b. 1949, Los Angeles, lives in San Francisco.]
I love the fact that a photograph is always open to interpretation—there is no fixed meaning.
Sarah Moon (Marielle Hadengue)
[Model and photographer, b. 1941, Paris, France, lives in Paris.]
Why should there be only one sort of photography? I want to create images with elements of my choosing, narrative or evocative... I give myself a literary frame, I tell a story.
Gregory Crewdson
[Photographer, b. 1962, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New Haven Connecticut.]
…the photograph is still and frozen. From day one, I have been interested in taking that limitation and trying to find the strength in it—like a story that is forever frozen in between moments, before and after, and always left as a kind of unresolved question.
Sebastião Salgado
[Photographer, b. 1944, Aimores, Minas Gerias, Brazil, lives in Paris and Brazil.]
I can be an artist
a posteriori, not
a priori. If my pictures tell the story, our story, human story, then in a hundred years, then they can be considered an art reference, but now they are not made as art. I’m a journalist. My life’s on the road, my studio is the planet.
Alec Soth
[Photographer, b. 1969, Minneapolis, Minnesota, lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.]
My big theory is that [photography] doesn’t function as a narrative, but the photographer takes the place of the protagonist in the story, and you take the place of the photographer.
Elie Wiesel
[Writer and activist, b. 1928, Sighet, Romania, lives in New York.]
Sometimes I think I prefer the storyteller in [Roman Vishniac] to the photographer. But aren’t they one and the same?
Walter Benjamin
[Philosopher, critic, and theorist, b. 1892, Berlin, d. 1940, Port Bou, France.]
History breaks down into images, not into stories.
