Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Transforming is what art does, but photography that bears witness to the calamitous and the reprehensible is much criticized if it seems “aesthetic;” that is, too much like art.
Lord Snowdon (Antony Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones)
[Earl and photographer, b. 1930, London, England, d. 2017, London.]
I think it’s all absolute nonsense how people talk about photography as being an art. It’s a very menial career that you do if you draw badly. Now they teach it at the Royal College of Art and get grand about it. It’s the only course there that I don’t understand.
Janet Malcolm
[Writer, b. 1934, Prague, Czechoslovakia, lives in New York.]
I was always trying to take art photographs, but the most interesting pictures were the snapshots. The artsy pictures were boring, always.
Victor Burgin
[Artist and writer, b. 1941, Sheffield, England, lives in London.]
A job the artist does which no-one else does is to dismantle existing communication codes and to combine some of their elements into structures which can be used to generate new pictures of the world.
James Dean
[Actor, b. 1931, Marion, Indiana, d. 1955, Cholame, California.]
Can’t you see? I’m Michelangelo’s David.
(Explaining his pose to photographer Roy Schatt.)
Thomas Ruff
[Photographer, b. 1958, Zell, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf, Germany.]
I received my training at an art academy, so what I produce is art. That’s what is artistic about my photographs.
Man Ray (Emanuel Radnitsky)
[Artist, b. 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1976, Paris.]
I photograph what I do not wish to paint and I paint what I cannot photograph.
Marius de Zayas
[Artist, b. 1880, Veracruz, Mexico, d. 1961, Greenwich, Connecticut.]
Photography is beginning to be photography, for until now it has only been art.
(1923)
