Nicholas Nixon
[Photographer, b. 1947, Detroit, Michigan, lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.]
People are self-conscious at first. But it gets better as we kind of dance with each other... it’s like a date, in a way. We get more comfortable together. The best pictures are usually the last ones.
Annie Leibovitz
[Photographer, b. 1949, Westbury, Connecticut, lives in New York.]
When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I’d like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.
Ben Shahn
[Photographer and artist, b. 1898, Kovno, Russia (now Kaunas, Lithuania), d. 1969, New York.]
I confess that Roy [Stryker] was a little bit dictatorial in his editing and he ruined quite a number of my pictures, which he stopped doing later. He used to punch a hole through a negative. Some of them were incredibly valuable. He didn’t understand at the time.
Mary Ellen Mark
[Photographer, b. 1940, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, d. 2015, New York.]
What’s more frustrating than magazines giving less and less space is that they tell you what they want. Not LIFE, but some magazines actually want you to be an illustrator, and I don’t want to be an illustrator—I don’t enjoy those assignments. You know, I want to have a change to be a real part of the creative process and not just a technician who clicks the camera.
Julio Cortázar
[Writer, b. 1914, Brussels, Belgium, d. 1984, Paris, France.]
I raised the camera, pretended to study a focus which did not include them, and waited and watched closely, sure that I would finally catch the revealing expression, one that would sum it all up, life that is rhythmed by movement but which a stiff image destroys, taking time in cross section, if we do not choose the essential imperceptible fraction of it.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
In photojournalistic reporting, inevitably, you’re an outsider.
Chris Killip
[Photographer, b. 1946, Douglas, Isle of Man, United Kingdom, lives in Boston.]
I take what isn’t mine and I covet other people’s lives.
Tom Wolfe
[Writer, b. 1930, Richmond, Virginia, d. 2018, New York.]
[Richard Avedon] began standing people up against white no-seam paper and lighting their faces so that every wen, hickey, zit, whitehead, blackhead, goober, acne-crater, beard follicle, nose hair, ear bristle, crow’s foot, wattle, mold, eye bag, and liver spot stood out like a tumor, and the poor grey souls looked like pustular ruins, sad, spent, demoralized. Ah, Lord, you never get out of this world alive! This was
serious work.
