Edward Hopper
[Artist, b. 1882, Nyack, New York, d. 1967, New York.]
I once got a little camera to use for details of architecture and so forth but the photo was always so different from the perspective the eye gives, I gave it up.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
The traditional function of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and
of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as an art.
Matthew Brady
[Photographer, b. 1823, Warren County, New York, d. 1896, New York.]
I had great trouble in making a natural picture. When I got him before the camera I asked if I might arrange his collar, and with that he began to pull it up. “Ah,” said Lincoln, “I see you want to shorten my neck.” “That’s just it,” I answered, and we both laughed.
Larry Sultan
[Photographer, b. 1946, Brooklyn, New York, d. 2009, Greenbrae, California.]
...when it comes down to making work that really sings, I don’t know if I can teach any of it. I don’t even know if I can do any of it half the time. It’s so much about failure, it’s so much about making pictures that are so utterly boring and overstated, you’re endlessly disappointed. And in that process you hopefully find something that draws you back and calls to you.
Alfred Stieglitz
[Photographer and curator, b. 1864, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1946, New York.]
The sharp outlines which we Americans are so proud of as being proof of great perfection in our art are
untrue to Nature, and hence an abomination to the artist.
(1892)
Tom Wolfe
[Writer, b. 1930, Richmond, Virginia, d. 2018, New York.]
Suddenly there is magic in such items... as random and eccentric framing, blurred images, keeling horizons, distorted scale, unreal colors (puce waters, chartreuse skies), grotesque foreshortening... and nightclub photo lighting with its flash overexposures and clotted shadows and inexplicable detail and tilted walls and stray items—arms, legs, shoes, cloven bottoms, anorexic elbows—appearing in an amputated condition about the edges... Once regarded as technical limitation of the medium, as annoyances to be overcome by professional expertise, they now become like animae, tree spirits, to be treated with reverence and looked to for guidance.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
If a good photo is cropped, even ever so slightly, the relative proportions, the play of proportions, are sure to be destroyed, and besides, it is highly unlikely that a badly composed shot will be saved by trying to frame it anew in the darkroom, cropping the negative under the enlarger: the integrity of the initial vision is lost.
Henry Peach Robinson
[Photographer, b. 1830, Ludlow, Shropshire, England, d. 1901, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England.]
In the early days we were surprised and delighted with a photograph, as a photograph, just because we had not hitherto conceived possible any definition or finish that approached nature so closely... . But soon we wanted something more. We got tired of the sameness of the exquisiteness of the photograph, and if it had nothing to say, if it was not a view, or a portrait of something or somebody, we cared less and less for it. Why? Because the photograph told us everything about the facts of nature and left out the mystery. Now, however hard-headed a man may be, he cannot stand too many facts; it is easy to get a surfeit of realities, and he wants a little mystification as a relief.
(1896)
