Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
One really doesn’t associate a machine—a little box with glass in it—with the personal imprint of the operator, but it is there, and it’s a kind of magic, inexplicable quality.
Shirin Neshat
[Artist, photographer, and filmmaker, b. 1957, Qazvin, Iran, lives in New York.]
Those of us living in the state of “in between” have certain advantages and disadvantages. The advantage of being exposed to a new culture and in my case the freedom that comes with living in the USA. The disadvantages of course being that you will never experience again being a “center” or quite “home” anywhere...
Kate Moss
[Model, b. 1974, Croydon, England, lives in St Johns Wood, England.]
In a way, it’s like the photographer always has his vision of me. The pictures that I’m known for are not really my image, they’re always the photographer’s vision of me. I can look a hundred different ways, but what people see of me in pictures is not really my image.
Alfred Eisenstaedt
[Photographer, b. 1898, Dirschau, West Prussia (now Tczew, Poland), d. 1995, New York.]
We are only beginning to learn what to say in a photograph. The world we live in is a succession of fleeting moments, any one of which might say something significant. When such an instant arrives, I react intuitively. There is, I think, an electronic impulse between my eye and my finger. But even this is not enough. I dream that someday the step between my mind and my finger will no longer be needed. And that simply by blinking my eyes, I shall make pictures. Then, I think, I shall really have become a photographer.
Margaret Bourke-White
[Photographer, b. 1904, New York, d. 1971, Darien, Connecticut.]
If anybody gets in my way when I'm making a picture, I become irrational. I’m never sure what I’m going to do, or sometimes even aware of what I do—only that I want that picture.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Unlike the fine-art object of pre-democratic eras, photographs don’t seem deeply beholden to the intentions of an artist. Rather, they owe their existence to a loose cooperation (quasi-magical, quasi-accidental) between photographer and subject—mediated by an ever simpler and more automatic machine, which is tireless, and which even when capricious can produce a result that is interesting and never entirely wrong.
Ralph Gibson
[Photographer, b. 1939, Los Angeles, California, lives in New York.]
It occurs to me that at the beginning one works passionately to learn photography. This takes years, and the craft is usually formed during this period. Then as time passes one finds oneself more in the role of serving the medium... Then, as in the example of several masters that I have been privileged to know personally, it appears that by having devoted oneself totally to the medium, one becomes photography.
John Szarkowski
[Curator, critic, historian, and photographer, b. 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, d. 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]
A long generation ago photographers still worked under great black focusing cloths, which hid not only their faces but (it seemed) their magic secrets. Old photographers smelled of hypo, and had fingernails black to the cuticle, and were surrounded by an aura of esoteric alchemy.
