Pablo Picasso
[Artist, b. 1881, Málaga, Spain, d. 1973, Mougin, France.]
Photography has arrived at the point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and even from the subject. In any case, a certain aspect of the subject now belongs to the domain of photography. So shouldn’t painters profit from their newly acquired liberty, and make use of it to do other things?
Robert Rauschenberg
[Artist, b. 1925, Port Arthur, Texas, d. 2008, Captiva Island, Florida.]
I don’t want a picture to look like something it isn’t. I want it to look like something it is.
Ralph Gibson
[Photographer, b. 1939, Los Angeles, California, lives in New York.]
I embrace the abstract in photography and exist on a few bits of order extracted from the chaos of reality.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
[Artist, photographer, designer, and teacher, b. 1895, Bacsbarsod, Hungary, d. 1946, Chicago, Illinois.]
The photogram, or camera-less record of forms produced by light, which embodies the unique nature of the photographic process, is the real key to photography.
Man Ray (Emanuel Radnitsky)
[Artist, b. 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1976, Paris.]
I have freed myself from the sticky medium of paint and am working directly with light itself.
(On “Rayographs,” his term for photograms.)
John Szarkowski
[Curator, critic, historian, and photographer, b. 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, d. 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]
Much of the best energy of photographers during the past seventy years has been dedicated to the task of thinning out the rank growth of information that the camera impartially records if left to its own devices, in favor of pictures which have been—for lack of a better word—simpler.
(1973)
Ken Domon
[Photographer, b. 1909, Sakata, Japan, d. 1990, Tokyo.]
If it is not realistic, it is not photography.
Alvin Langdon Coburn
[Photographer, b. 1882, Boston, Massachusetts, d. 1966, Wales.]
Why, I ask you earnestly, need we go on making commonplace little exposures that may be sorted into groups of landscapes, portraits and figure studies? Think of the joy of doing something which it would be impossible to tell which was top and which was the bottom!... I do not think we have begun even to realize the possibilities of the camera.
(1916)
