Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]

 Recently I did a picture—I’ve had this experience before—and I made rough prints of a number of them. There was something wrong in all of them. I felt I’d sort of missed it and I figured I’d go back. But there was one that was just totally peculiar. It was a terrible dodo of a picture. It looks to me a little as if the lady’s husband took it. It’s terribly head-on and sort of ugly and there’s something terrific about it. I’ve gotten to like it better and better and now I’m secretly sort of nutty about it. 

Dziga Vertov
[Artist and filmmaker, b. 1896, Bialystok, d. 1954, Moscow.]

 We cannot improve the making of our eyes, but we can endlessly perfect the camera. 

Gerhard Richter
[Artist, b. 1932, Dresden, lives in Düsseldorf.]

 Throwaway snapshots come closest to achieving the state of pure picture. 

John Loengard
[Photographer, editor, and critic, b. 1934, New York, lives in New York.]

 Usually I think if there is something imperfect in a photograph it makes the picture more real. Photographs that are slick, smooth, and perfect seem less honest to me. 

Phil Stern
[Photographer, b. 1919, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 2014, Los Angeles.]

 There is no such thing as the perfect picture. That’s the challenge of photography. I was always striving for perfection, even though I knew I could never achieve it. But it kept me reaching for something... 

Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]

 I don’t know what good composition is... Sometimes for me composition has to do with a certain brightness or a certain coming to restness and other times it has to do with funny mistakes. There’s a kind of rightness and wrongness and sometimes I like rightness and sometimes I like wrongness. 

Barbara Ess
[Photographer, b. 1948, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New York.]

 My camera distorts and I like that—I like distortion in music too because it loosens things up. (On her pinhole camera) 

Daido Moriyama
[Photographer, b. 1938, Ikeda-cho, Osaka, Japan, lives in Tokyo.]

 [My] photos are often out of focus, rough, streaky, warped, etc. But if you think about it, a normal human being will in one day perceive an infinite number of images, and some of them are focused upon, others are barely seen out of the corner of one’s eye. 
quotes 17-24 of 165
first page previous page page 3 of 21 next page last page
display quotes