Chester Higgins
[Photographer, b. 1946, Lexington, Kentucky, lives in Brooklyn, New York.]
I had a choice: I could wail against the racism of the [prevailing] pictures or I could go and create photographs that would tell a contrary story.
Richard Misrach
[Photographer, b. 1949, Los Angeles, lives in San Francisco.]
To me, the work I do is a means of interpreting unsettling truths, of bearing witness, and of sounding an alarm. The beauty of formal representation both carries an affirmation of life and subversively brings us face to face with news from our besieged world.
David Levi Strauss
[Writer and critic, b. 1953, Junction City, Kansas, lives in New York.]
Photographic images used to be about the trace. Digital images are about the
flow.
Thomas Ruff
[Photographer, b. 1958, Zell, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf, Germany.]
The people have to know what my portraits are like in order to behave in such a way that the result is one of my portraits.
Lucy Lippard
[Critic and writer, b. 1936, New York, lives in Galisteo, New Mexico.]
Despite having been awarded the dubious honor of arthood, all photography is still perceived as having one foot in the real world, a toe in the chilly waters of verisimilitude, no matter how often it is demonstrated that photographs can and do lie.
Sally Mann
[Photographer, b. 1951, Lexington, Virginia, lives in Lexington.]
The fact is that these are not my children; they are figures on silvery paper slivered out of time. They represent my children at a fraction of a second on one particular afternoon with infinite variables of light, expression, posture, muscle tension, mood, wind and shade. These are not my children at all; these are children in a photograph.
Lee Friedlander
[Photographer, b. 1934, Aberdeen, Washington, lives in New York.]
Photography doesn’t just give you the tree, it gives you every leaf on the tree.
A.D. Coleman
[Critic and writer, b. 1943, New York, lives in New York.]
What a photograph shows us is how a particular thing could be seen, or could be made to look—at a specific moment, in a specific context, by a specific photographer employing specific tools.
