Edward Weston
[Photographer, b. 1886, Highland Park, Illinois, d. 1958, Wildcat Hill, California.]
An idea just as abstract as could be conceived by sculptor or painter can be expressed through “objective” recording with the camera, because nature has everything that can possibly be imagined by the artist: and the camera, controlled by wisdom, goes beyond statistics.
Francis Galton
[Polymath, explorer, anthropologist, inventor, meteorologist, statistician, b. 1822, Birmingham, England, d. Haslemere, Surrey, England.]
[My composite portrait process] represents no man in particular, but portrays an imaginary figure possessing the average features of any group of men. These ideal faces have a surprising air of reality. Nobody who glanced at one of them for the first time, would doubt its being the likeness of a living person, yet, as I have said, it is no such thing; it is the portrait of a type and not of an individual.
(1879)
Alfred Stieglitz
[Photographer and curator, b. 1864, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1946, New York.]
I am at last photographing again... It is straight... No sentimentalism. Not old nor new—It is so sharp you can see the [pores] in a face—& yet it is abstract.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me…. I am delighted (or depressed) to know that the thing of the past, by its immediate radiations (its luminances), has really touched the surface which in turn my gaze will touch…. [In the way] the photographed body touches me with its own rays.
Abraham Maslow
[b. 1908, Brooklyn, New York, d. 1970, Menlo Park, California.]
In a word, to perceive an object abstractly means not to perceive some aspects of it. It clearly implies selection of some attributes, rejection of other attributes, creation or distortion of still others. We make of it what we wish. We create it.
Ralph Eugene Meatyard
[Photographer, b. 1925, Normal, Illinois, d. 1972, Lexington, Kentucky.]
I work in several different groups of pictures which act on and with each other—ranging from several abstracted manners to a form for the surreal. I have been called a preacher—but, in reality, I’m more generally philosophical. I have never made an abstracted photograph without content. An educated background in Zen influences all of my photographs. It has been said that my work resembles, more closely than any photographer, “Le Douanier” Rousseau—working in a fairly isolated area and feeding mostly on myself—I feel that I am a “primitive photographer.”
Nathan Lyons
[Photographer, writer, and curator, b. 1930, Jamaica, New York, d. 2016, Rochester, New York.]
The accidents of millions of amateurs devoid of a picture vocabulary—which produced an outpouring of multiple exposures, distortions, unusual perspectives, foreshortening of planes, imbalance—has contributed greatly to the visual vocabulary of all media since before the turn of the century.
Thomas Ruff
[Photographer, b. 1958, Zell, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf, Germany.]
I used to say that the picture has an autonomous existence apart from what it represents, or that it acquires a life of its own. Maybe when I said that, I meant thinking about how you make pictures, but the reality is still there anyway because there really was someone sitting in front of the camera when the picture was taken. So now, do we have autonomy?
