Cindy Sherman
[Artist, b. 1954, Glen Ridge, New Jersey, lives in New York.]
Some people have told me they remember the film that one of my images is derived from, but in fact I had no film in mind at all.
Jacques-Henri Lartigue
[Photographer, b. 1894, Courbevoie, France, d. 1986, Nice, France.]
Photography and writing are marvelous distractions from painting. I might even have found movies more interesting than photography. I tried it a bit, but not enough.
Laurie Simmons
[Photographer, b. 1949, Long Island, New York, lives in New York.]
I realized early on that artifice attracted me to an image more than any other quality—I mean artifice in the sense of staging and heightened color and exaggerated lighting, not a surreal or fictive moment… I think the lighting and feeling of Cinemascope, the movies I saw as a kid, always stayed with me as a kind of glorious vision of reality.
Eileen Cowin
[Photographer, b. 1947, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Santa Monica, California.]
The photograph as metaphor suggests many possible readings, blending memory, fantasy, and desire. As in film, the lines between fantasy and reality are blurred.
Marilyn Nance
[Photographer and artist, b. 1953, New York, lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.]
I call myself a photographer now because, eventually, you have to choose something. People just don’t understand it when you tell them, “I do film, I do video...” So I just chose to call myself a photographer.
Arnold Genthe
[Photographer, b. 1869, Berlin, Germany, d. 1942, New York.]
Of the pictures I had made during the fire, there are several, I believe, that will be of lasting interest. There is particularly the one scene that I recorded the morning of the first day of the fire which shows, in a pictorially effective composition, the results of the earthquake, the beginning of the fire and the attitude of the people. On the right is a house, the front of which had collapsed into the street. The occupants are sitting on chairs calmly watching the approach of the fire. Groups of people are standing in the street, motionless, gazing at the clouds of smoke. When the fire crept up close, they would just move up a block. It is hard to believe that such a scene actually occurred in the way the photograph represents it. Several people upon seeing it have exclaimed, “Oh, is that a still from a Cecil De Mille picture?” To which the answer has been, “No, the director of this scene was the Lord himself.”
(On photographing the San Francisco earthquake of 1906)
John Baldessari
[Artist, b. 1931, National City, California, lives in Venice, California.]
What I try to do is reinvigorate strategies and clichés I find in Hollywood movies. At a certain point I had these huge folders, each one classified according to subject matter or genre: people with guns, people kissing, Indians and cowboys falling off horses, getting shot, getting shot with arrows—almost every plot device. Then I cropped the cheap, recycled imagery to give exhausted images new meaning, or at least something other than their original meaning. I’m basically reassembling atoms to give them a meaning that’s more
au courant.
John Waters
[Filmmaker and photographer, b. 1946, Baltimore, Maryland, lives in Baltimore.]
Watching a movie should be like hunting. Out of context, every image of the cinema is yours for a split second. Take them before they bury it.
