Steve McCurry
[Photographer, b. 1950, Newton Square, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
If you wait, people will forget your camera and the soul will drift up into view.
Helmut Newton
[Photographer, b. 1920, Berlin, d. 2004, Los Angeles.]
My mother always said: “If you have any problems, Helmut, don’t tell us, tell the doctor.”
Gilles Deleuze
[Writer and philosopher, b. 1925, Paris, d. 1995, Paris.]
My eye, my brain, are images, parts of my body. How could my brain contain images since it is one image among others?
David LaChapelle
[Photographer, b. 1968, Connecticut, lives in New York.]
I think we’re in a post-pornographic time and nothing seems shocking, but everything remains carnal no matter what you do.
Yousuf Karsh
[Photographer, b. 1908, Mardin, Armenia, d. 2002, Boston, Massachusetts.]
When one sees the residuum of greatness before one’s camera, one must recognize it in a flash. There is a brief moment when all that there is in a man’s mind and soul and spirit may be reflected through his eyes, his hands, his attitude. This is the moment to record. This is the elusive “moment of truth.”
Alfred Eisenstaedt
[Photographer, b. 1898, Dirschau, West Prussia (now Tczew, Poland), d. 1995, New York.]
We are only beginning to learn what to say in a photograph. The world we live in is a succession of fleeting moments, any one of which might say something significant. When such an instant arrives, I react intuitively. There is, I think, an electronic impulse between my eye and my finger. But even this is not enough. I dream that someday the step between my mind and my finger will no longer be needed. And that simply by blinking my eyes, I shall make pictures. Then, I think, I shall really have become a photographer.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
Once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of “posing,” I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image.
Adam Gopnik
[Writer and critic, b. 1956, Philadelphia, lives in New York.]
Is the selfie—those newly omnipresent photos of ourselves, taken with our own little palm-fitting cameras—merely a genre of informal self-portraiture, as old as the camera and as many-sided, or is it visual crabgrass, covering over and crowding out deeper investigation of who we are?
