Imogen Cunningham
[Photographer, b. 1883, Portland, d. 1976, San Francisco.]
The imaginative photographer is always dreaming and trying to record his dream.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.
Larry Clark
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1943, Tulsa, Oklahoma, lives in New York.]
I always wished I could be a painter or a filmmaker, anything but a fucking photographer. I certainly didn’t want to be in a photography gallery.
Arnold Newman
[Photographer, b. 1918, New York, d. 2006, New York.]
Those who call themselves art photographers are pompous, arrogant egoists.
Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
I think being a photographer is a little like being a whore: if you’re really really good at it, nobody will call you that.
Philip Jones Griffiths
[Photojournalist, b. 1936, Rhuddian, Wales, d. 2008, London.]
The only thing we photographers really want more than life, more than sex, more than anything, is to be invisible.
Garry Winogrand
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, d. 1984, Tijuana, Mexico.]
A photographer’s responsible for two things. Once you put your body where you want it to be, what’s in the frame and when you snap the shutter. That’s what the photographer does. The camera does the rest.
Chuck Close
[Artist, b. 1940, Monroe, Washington, lives in New York.]
The minute I started working with Polaroid I realized that as soon as I got a print that I thought I wanted to work from, there was no reason to make more versions. I began to take photographs that I had really no intention of making a painting from. So I reluctantly began to accept the fact that if I’m making photographs with no life other than that of a photograph, then golly, I must be a photographer. So I sort of backed into it. Thinking about myself as a photographer—it’s still something I’m not totally comfortable with.
