Garry Winogrand
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, d. 1984, Tijuana, Mexico.]
Every photograph is a battle of form versus content. The good ones are on the border of failure.
Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
I say half jokingly that photography is the most difficult of the arts. It does require a certain arrogance to see and to choose. I feel myself walking on a tightrope instead of on the ground.
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.
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.
Philip-Lorca diCorcia
[Artist, b. 1953, Hartford, Connecticut, lives in New York.]
There’s a reductiveness to photography, of course—in the framing of reality and the exclusion of chunks of it (the rest of the world, in fact). It’s almost as if the act of photography bears some relationship to how we consciously manage the uncontrollable set of possibilities that exist in life.
[Photography is a] hair-raising joy ride in a medium that, despite being a mechanical trick, can break down the division between mind and matter like a superhero, or an artist.
Marc Riboud
[Photographer, b. 1923, St.-Genis-Laval, France, d. 2016, Paris.]
I’m often asked: Did you get what you wanted? But how should I know what I wanted? A photo is an encounter, a surprise.
Bruce Davidson
[Photographer, b. 1933, Oak Park, Illinois, lives in New York.]
I don’t always know why I’m photographing something. It’s my learning machine.
