Joel-Peter Witkin
[Photographer, b. 1939, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.]
I have consecrated my life to changing matter into spirit with the hope of one day seeing it all. Seeing in its total form, while wearing the mask, from the distance of death. And there, in the eternal destiny, to seek the face I had before the world was made.
Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
The camera is first a means of self-discovery and a means of self-growth. The artist has one thing to say—himself.
Ruth Bernhard
[Photographer, b. 1905, Berlin, d. 2006, San Francisco.]
For me, the creation of a photograph is experienced as a heightened emotional response, most akin to poetry and music, each image the culmination of a compelling impulse I cannot deny. Whether working with a human figure or a still life, I am deeply aware of my spiritual connection with it. In my life, as in my work, I am motivated by a great yearning for balance and harmony beyond the realm of human experience, reaching for the essence of oneness with the Universe.
Emile Zola
[Writer, b. 1840, Paris, France, d. 1902, Paris.]
The word realist means nothing to me, because I would subordinate reality to temperament. Give me what is true and I applaud; but give me what is
individual and alive and I applaud even more.
Beat Streuli
[Photographer and visual artist, b. 1957, Altdorf, Switzerland, lives in Zurich and Brussels.]
At the core of my work there is this eternal back-and-forth between being confined to one’s own individuality and that longing to be part of the other, the outside world: the impossibility of ever being able to get beneath another person’s skin.
Edward Steichen
[Photographer and curator, b. 1879, Luxembourg, Germany, d. 1973, West Redding, Connecticut.]
Long before the birth of a word language the caveman communicated by visual images. The invention of photography gave visual communication its most simple, direct, universal language.
(1960)
Luigi Ghirri
[Photographer, b. 1943, Scandiano, Italy, d. 1992, Reggio Emilia, Italy.]
In 1969, a photograph taken from a spaceship traveling to the moon appeared on every newspaper; this was the first photograph of the entire world. The image that man had pursued for centuries was presented for our view; it held within it all previous incomplete images, all books that had been written, all signs, those that had been deciphered and those that had not. It was not only the image of the entire world, but the only image that contained
all other images of the world: graffiti, frescoes, paintings, writings, photographs, books, films. It was at once the representation of the world and all representations of the world.
Cindy Sherman
[Artist, b. 1954, Glen Ridge, New Jersey, lives in New York.]
[My work is] maybe about me maybe not wanting to be me and wanting to be all these other characters. Or at least try them on.
