Oliver Wendell Holmes
[Physician, author, father of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, b. 1809, Cambridge, Massachusetts, d. 1894, Boston, Massachusetts.]
The very things which an artist would leave out, or render imperfectly, the photograph takes infinite care with, and so makes its illusions perfect.
(1859) 
Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don’t like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.
Harry Callahan
[Photographer, b. 1912, Detroit, Michigan, d. 1999, Atlanta, Georgia.]
I sort of believe [previsualization] is untrue. I mean, are [Ansel Adams and the others] previsualizing a masterpiece, or a perfect print, or what? If I knew every picture I made was going to be a real picture, maybe I could go along with that, but I can’t.
Sam Abell
[Photographer, b. 1945, Sylvania, Ohio, lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.]
A mad, keen photographer needs to get out into the world and work and make mistakes.
John Steinbeck
[Writer, b. 1902, Salinas, California, d. 1968, Sag Harbor, New York.]
No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable.
William J. T. Mitchell
[Writer, theorist, and architect, b. 1944, Melbourne, Australia, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
The tools of traditional photography were well suited to Strand’s and Weston’s high-modernist intentions—their quest for a mind of objective truth assured by a quasi-scientific procedure and closed, finished perfection.
Edward Weston
[Photographer, b. 1886, Highland Park, Illinois, d. 1958, Wildcat Hill, California.]
I have been photographing our toilet, that glossy enameled receptacle of extraordinary beauty... Here was every sensuous curve of the “human figure divine” but minus the imperfections. Never did the Greeks reach a more significant consummation to their culture, and it somehow reminded me, forward movement of finely progressing contours, of the Victory of Samothrace.
Lev Manovich
[Artist, theorist, and critic, b. 1960, Moscow, lives in New York.]
... while in theory digital technology entails the flawless replication of data, its actual use in contemporary society is characterized by the loss of data, degradation, and noise; the noise which is even stronger than that of traditional photography.
