Phil Stern
[Photographer, b. 1919, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 2014, Los Angeles.]
What is a photographer? Some dumb-fucking, uneducated, illiterate schmuck. 
Look, Matisse I ain’t. You know how they have on the invitations, “a reception for the artist will be held at...” And I say, “Look, you gotta change this. I’m not an artist. I’m a photographer, a skilled craftsman.” Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
I’m not a photographer. I’ve never been. It’s a way of drawing only. It is instant drawing. Chester Higgins
[Photographer, b. 1946, Lexington, Kentucky, lives in Brooklyn, New York.]
I learned that the camera never lies about the photographer. Imogen Cunningham
[Photographer, b. 1883, Portland, d. 1976, San Francisco.]
The imaginative photographer is always dreaming and trying to record his dream. James Agee
[Writer, b. 1909, Knoxville, Tennessee, d. 1955, New York.]
JAMES AGEE: a spy, traveling as a journalist.WALKER EVANS: a counter-spy, traveling as a photographer.
(Self-descriptions in the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men)
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it. Brassaï (Gyula Halász)
[Photographer, b. 1889, Brassó, Transylvania, Hungary (now Romania), d. 1984, Eze, Alpes-Maritimes, France.]
It is not sociologists who provide insights but photographers of our sort who are observers at the very center of their times. I have always felt strongly that this was the photographer’s true vocation.