John Szarkowski
[Curator, critic, historian, and photographer, b. 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, d. 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]
Photography is a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing. The contest can be held anywhere...
Garry Winogrand
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, d. 1984, Tijuana, Mexico.]
What photograph isn’t a still life?
Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
[Photography] is not cute cats, nor nudes, motherhood, or arrangements of manufactured products. Under no circumstances is it anything ever anywhere near a beach.
Kansuke Yamagata
[Photographer and poet, b. 1914, Nagoya, Japan, d. 1987, Nagoya.]
[Experimental] photography—unlike a knife or fountain pen—has no practical use or function. We can locate the rationale for photography’s superiority in its total lack of purpose, complete uselessness, and absolute meaninglessness.
Leonard Freed
[Photographer, b. 1929, Brooklyn, New York, d. 2006, Garrison, New York.]
Photography is like life. What does it all mean? I don’t know, but you get an impression, a feeling... An impression of walking through the street, walking through the park, walking through life. I’m very suspicious of people who say they know what it means.
Susie Linfield
[Writer and critic, New York, lives in New York.]
...we’re still not at all sure what photography is: is it news, art, entertainment, documentation, science, or surveillance? It tends to blur all those boundaries, which is exciting, but also bewildering and confusing.
Martin Parr
[Photographer, b. 1952, Epson, Surrey, England, lives in Bristol and London, England.]
Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work.
Luigi Ghirri
[Photographer, b. 1943, Scandiano, Italy, d. 1992, Reggio Emilia, Italy.]
I have always felt that photography is a language for seeing and not for transforming, hiding, or modifying reality.
