Henry Peach Robinson
[Photographer, b. 1830, Ludlow, Shropshire, England, d. 1901, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England.]
The photographer must not let his invention tempt him to represent, by any trick, any scene that does not occur in nature; if he does, he does violence to his art, because it is known that his finished result represents some object or thing that has existed for a space of time before his camera.
Emmet Gowin
[Photographer, b. 1941, Danville, Virginia, lives in Princeton, New Jersey.]
[From 1966 to 1970] I was becoming alive to certain essential qualities in family photographs. Above all I admired what the camera made. The whole person was presented to the camera. There was no interference, or so it seemed. And sometimes the frame cut through the world with a surprise. There could be no doubt that the picture belonged more to the world of things and facts than to the photographer.
Laurel Nakadate
[Video artist and photographer, b. 1975, Austin, Texas, lives in New York.]
Although I get a lot of ideas from things that have happened in my life, I see the final product as a place where my imagination meets my experience. What I love about photography is that nothing is really as it seems.
W. Eugene Smith
[Photographer, b. 1918, Wichita, Kansas, d. 1978, Tucson, Arizona.]
With considerable soul searching, that to the utmost of my ability, I have let truth be the prejudice.
Max Dupain
[Photographer, b. 1911, Sidney, Australia, d. 1992, Sidney.]
The photograph is concerned with showing actual life often beyond the scope of the human eye, the painting is a symbol of life and fused with the spiritual interpretation of the painter. The former is objective, the later is subjective and never the twain shall meet.
(1947)
David LaChapelle
[Photographer, b. 1968, Connecticut, lives in New York.]
The two most ripped-off photographers in the past six years have been Nan Goldin and Larry Clark. These two artists took some harrowing pictures of themselves, their lovers, their fights. What some fashion photographers did was imitate these artists by getting some model and fucking up her hair and putting her in a Prada top and Gucci shoes and throwing her in a dirty apartment that’s not her own. They say these pictures are more modern and more real, but they’re fantasy presented as real. My work is fantasy presented as fantasy; I’m into escapism and beauty. I live on the Lower East Side, and once, I lived in a squat. I’ve had friends OD, so I don’t want to see someone looking strung out—I’ve been there.
Ernst Haas
[Photographer, b. 1921, Vienna, Austria, d. 1986, New York City.]
The reporter is someone in a trench coat with a rakishly upturned collar, who runs after events, wants to capture facts, narrates, reports on so-called reality. To be honest, I’m not too interested in facts. My issues are more of an artistic nature. These are rather more the problems of the painter. I’m a painter who was too impatient to paint, and therefore became a photographer.
Joan Didion
[Writer, b. 1934, Sacramento, California, lives in New York.]
For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.”
