Edouard Boubat
[Photographer, b. 1923, Paris, France, d. 1999, Paris.]

 Millions of unnecessary photos are taken every day. People stand before the Pyramids and photograph them, when for three cents they could buy postcards which show them much better. 

Wright Morris
[Writer and photographer, b. 1910, Central City, Nebraska, d. 1998, Mill Valley, California.]

 The vast number of photographers, feeding on anything visible, overgraze the landscape the way cattle overgraze their pasture. 

Vik Muniz
[Artist, b. 1961, Sao Paulo, Brazil, lives in New York.]

 Smiling for a camera seems to be embedded in the genetic code—even the blind do it. 

John Baldessari
[Artist, b. 1931, National City, California, lives in Venice, California.]

 I didn’t see painters doing paintings of glassware and glass shelves or sand dunes and receding snow fences. Why does that interest photographers and not artists? 

Alexey Brodovitch
[Graphic designer and art director, b. 1898, Ogolitchi, Russia, d. 1971, Le Thor, France.]

 What is a good photograph? I cannot say. A photograph is tied to the time, what is good today may be a cliché tomorrow. 

John Szarkowski
[Curator, critic, historian, and photographer, b. 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, d. 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]

 What’s happening is that people are making a billion photographs a year of their cats, frequently with the cats wearing costumes. Do you think I should be doing shows of cat photography? 

Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]

 You go to these schools, and the kids all show you gorgeous prints of water running over pebbles. I’d rather see a not-so-gorgeous mistake of a brilliant idea, an idea that maybe the kid didn’t even know how to solve technically, but who cares, because he’s talking about something incredible. It’s not the medium, it’s the message for me. 

Alfred Stieglitz
[Photographer and curator, b. 1864, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1946, New York.]

 When we go through an exhibition of American photographs, we are struck by the conventionality of the subjects chosen; we see the same types of country roads, of wood interiors, the everlasting waterfall, village scenes; we see the same groups at doorsteps and on piazzas; the same unfortunate attempts at illustrating popular poetry; the same etc., etc., ad infinitum. (1892) 
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