Emmet Gowin
[Photographer, b. 1941, Danville, Virginia, lives in Princeton, New Jersey.]

 [In nature] we may even glimpse the means with which to accept ourselves. Before nature, what I see does not truly belong to anyone; I know that I cannot have it, in fact, I’m not sure what I’m seeing. 

Elliott Erwitt
[Photographer, b. 1928, Paris, France, lives in New York.]

 Everything is there in front of us. If we knew what we were looking for, we’d see the great movements of tomorrow in the miniscule details of today. 

Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]

 I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake... In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself she is going to die... Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe. 

Susie Linfield
[Writer and critic, New York, lives in New York.]

 The photograph of suffering presents us, too, with the specific, individual experience of suffering. 

Frank Gohlke
[Photographer, b. 1942, Wichita Falls, Texas, lives in Southborough, Massachusetts.]

 I see the experience of pictures as a kind of cycle, a kind of circular motion in which you’re in the world, then you enter the picture and you’re in a different world (it’s not the same as the one you live in, but recognizable as one you might live in). And then you’re returned to your world with an enlarged sense of its possibilities. 

Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]

 A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask. 

Wynn Bullock
[Photographer, b. 1902, Chicago, Illinois, d. 1975, Monterey, California.]

 Mysteries lie all around us, even in the most familiar things, waiting only to be perceived. 
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