Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
The objectivity of the camera, used wrongly, is the very devil.
Allan Sekula
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1951, Erie, Pennsylvania, d. 2013, Los Angeles.]
...the hidden imperatives of photographic culture drag us in two contradictory directions: “science” and a myth of “objective truth” on the one hand, and toward “art” and a cult of “subjective experience” on the other. This dualism haunts photography, lending a certain goofy inconsistency to the most commonplace assertions about the medium.
Wright Morris
[Writer and photographer, b. 1910, Central City, Nebraska, d. 1998, Mill Valley, California.]
I prefer a taken to a made photograph.
Ray Metzker
[Photographer, b. 1931, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, d. 2014, Philadelphia.]
I am not an objective reporter. I prefer to go further, to the unstated things of our existence. What I can’t understand and grasp seems to lead me.
Pieter Hugo
[Photographer, b. 1976, Johannesburg, South Africa, lives in Cape Town.]
[Photography’s] true seduction lies in its foot in reality. It still has the pretense of being a quasi-document.
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.
Walter Lippmann
[Writer and journalist, b. 1889, New York, d. 1974, New York.]
The facts we see depend on where we are placed and the habits of our eyes.
Aaron Siskind
[Photographer, b. 1903, New York, d. 1991, Providence, Rhode Island.]
We look at the world and see what we have learned to believe is there. We have been conditioned to expect... but, as photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs.
