William Butler Yeats
[Poet and mystic, b. 1865, Dublin, Ireland, d. 1939, Menton, France.]

 The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world no longer a dream. 

Guillaume Apollinaire
[Poet and writer, b. 1880, Rome, d. 1918, Paris.]

 Your smile appeals as
might a flower.
Photograph you are the brown mushroom
in the forest
of her beauty.
The white spaces are
moonlight
in a peaceful garden
full of fountains and frenzied gardeners.
Photograph you are the smoke of the flame
of her beauty.
There are in you,
photograph, strains
of langorous music.
In you I hear
long melodies.
Photograph you are the shadow
cast by the sun
of her beauty. 

Robert Capa (Endre Ern? Friedmann)
[Photographer, b. 1913, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1954, Thai Binh, Vietnam.]

 Watch out for labels. They are reassuring but somebody’s going to stick one on you that you’ll never get rid of—“the little surrealist photographer.” You'll be lost—you’ll get precious and mannered. Take instead the label of “photojournalist” and keep the other thing for yourself, in your heart of hearts. (Warning to Henri Cartier-Bresson) 

Rosalind Krauss
[Writer, critic, and historian, b. 1941, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]

 Here is a paradox. It would seem that there cannot be surrealism and photography, but only photography or surrealism. 

James Joyce
[Writer, b. 1882, Rathgar, Ireland, d. 1941, Zurich, Switzerland.]

 ...I could pose for a picture naked to some rich fellow in Holles street when he lost the job in Helys and I was selling the clothes and strumming in the coffee palace would I be like that bath of the nymph with my hair down yes only shes younger or Im a little like that dirty bitch in that Spanish photo he has nymphs used they go about like that I asked him about her and that word met something with hoses in it... 

Man Ray (Emanuel Radnitsky)
[Artist, b. 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1976, Paris.]

 Cut out the eye from a photograph of one who has been loved but is seen no more.
Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and regulate the weight to suit the tempo desired.
Keep going to the limit of endurance.
With a hammer well-aimed, try to destroy the whole at a single blow.
(1932, describing “Object To Be Destroyed,” made using a metronome and the photographed eye of artist, lover and collaborator Lee Miller who left him.) 

Tristan Tzara (Sami Rosenstock)
[Writer and artist, b. 1896, Moineti, Bacu, Romania, d. 1963, Paris.]

 Is it a spiral of water in the tragic gleam of a revolver, an egg, a glistening arc or the floodgate of reason, a keen ear attuned to a mineral hiss, or a turbine of algebraic formulas? (On Man Ray’s first photograms, 1921.) 

Hans Bellmer
[Artist, b. 1902, Kattowitz, Germany (now Katowice, Poland), d. 1975, Paris.]

 Yes, my dolls were the beginning. Obviously there was a convulsive flavor to them because they reflected my anxiety and unhappiness. To an extent they represented an attempt to reject the horrors of adult life as it was in favor of a return to the wonder of childhood, but the eroticism was all-important, they became an erotic liberation for me. 
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