Penelope Umbrico
[Photographer, b. 1957, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
In the act of making, sharing, and consuming images, it seems like the more one shares images of oneself, the less one exists in the world.
As soon as you put something on the web, you’re crossing a threshold from the personal to the collective. No matter how personal an image is, if there’s another image somewhere that shares the same subject and approach, it becomes part of a phenomenon.
Pedro Meyer
[Photographer, b. 1935, Madrid, Spain, lives in Mexico City.]
I no longer have to stand for twelve hours at a time inevitably exposed to all those chemicals in the darkroom. As I grow older and my vision increasingly fails me, I can still make up with experience what I lack in agility out in the field. When geometry and content miss their original appointment, I can try to make up for such a lost encounter. I can, like a gold miner, go back to all my old archives and find countless new veins and find new uses for my previous work.
Nobuyoshi Araki
[Photographer, b. 1940, Tokyo, lives in Tokyo.]
While it’s all well and good to take advantage of what digital has to offer it's crucial to not neglect those things that are absolutely essential to all photography. I mean, unflinchingly photographing the most personal subjects. Men photograph women. Women photograph men. It’s not just taking pictures of things like the sky and city streets that a photographer thinks are neat. Take the love out and it means nothing. There's an aspect of photography that has nothing to do with whether a photo is shot with digital or conventional techniques, and the photographer must consider it.
William J. T. Mitchell
[Writer, theorist, and architect, b. 1944, Melbourne, Australia, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
The essential characteristic of digital information is that it can be manipulated easily and very rapidly by computer... Computational tools for transforming, combining, altering, and analyzing images are as essential to the digital artist as brushes and pigments to a painter.
Jay Maisel
[Photographer, b. 1931, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New York.]
... there’s one of the great lies of all times, that computers save time. They don’t. They’re time suckers. So, I’m trying not to get involved in the Photoshop.
David LaChapelle
[Photographer, b. 1968, Connecticut, lives in New York.]
The minute you point a camera at something, you are manipulating the image, because you are cropping out whatever is to the left and right of it. The minute you put a light on someone, you are manipulating the image.
Nicholas Nixon
[Photographer, b. 1947, Detroit, Michigan, lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.]
[Digital is] the future. People will do terrific things in it, and it’s maybe better for color now. But I’m not interested in the way [this work] looks. So much is changed—veracity is lost. The quality of witness is compromised.
(2005)
