Anders Petersen
[Photographer, b. 1944, Solna, Sweden, lives in Stockholm.]
I can’t describe reality; at the most, I can try to capture things that seem to be valid, the way I see them.
William Burroughs
[Writer, b. 1914, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1997, Lawrence, Kansas.]
Open your mind and let the pictures out.
Robert Frank
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1924, Zürich, Switzerland, lives in Mabou, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, and New York.]
The truth is somewhere between the documentary and the fictional, and that is what I try to show. What is real one moment has become imaginary the next. You believe what you see now, and the next second you don’t anymore.
Arthur Koestler
[Writer, b. 1905, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1983, London, England.]
The “innocent eye” is a fiction, based on the absurd notion that what we perceive in the present can be isolated in the mind from the influence of past experience There is no perception of “pure form” but meaning seeps in, and settles on the image.
James McNeill Whistler
[Artist, b. 1834, Lowell, Massachusetts, d. 1903, London.]
The imitator is a poor kind of creature. If the man who paints only the face, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer.
Annie Leibovitz
[Photographer, b. 1949, Westbury, Connecticut, lives in New York.]
...I gave up on being a journalist—I thought having a point of view was more important than being objective.
I no longer believe that there is such a thing as objectivity. Everyone has a point of view. Some people call it style, but what we’re really talking about here is the guts of a photograph. When you trust your point of view, that’s when you start taking pictures.
Jean François Millet
[Artist, b. 1814, Gruchy, France, d. 1875, Barbizon, France.]
A photograph is analogous to a plaster cast taken from life, which is always inferior to a good statue.
