Walter Benjamin
[Philosopher, critic, and theorist, b. 1892, Berlin, d. 1940, Port Bou, France.]

 Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably. 

Margaret Bourke-White
[Photographer, b. 1904, New York, d. 1971, Darien, Connecticut.]

 The element of discovery is very important. I don’t repeat myself well. I want and need that stimulus of walking forward from one new world to another. 

Abelardo Morell
[b. 1948, Havana, Cuba, lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.]

 The thing that makes me want to make pictures now is just looking without many prejudices. The stuff right under your eyes is the most wonderful universe—if you care to look with young eyes. 

Victor Burgin
[Artist and writer, b. 1941, Sheffield, England, lives in London.]

 A job the artist does which no-one else does is to dismantle existing communication codes and to combine some of their elements into structures which can be used to generate new pictures of the world. 

Man Ray (Emanuel Radnitsky)
[Artist, b. 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1976, Paris.]

 A photograph is to a painting what an automobile is to a horse. A rider on his horse is a beautiful thing, but I prefer a man in an airplane. 

Aleksander Rodchenko
[Artist, designer, architect, b. 1891, St. Petersburg, d. 1956, Moscow.]

 Photography—the new, rapid, concrete reflector of the world—should surely undertake to show the world from all vantage points, and to develop people’s capacity to see from all sides. (1928) 

Robert Frank
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1924, Zürich, Switzerland, lives in Mabou, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, and New York.]

 Photographs immediately make everything old. 

Jeff Wall
[Photographer, b. 1946, Vancouver, Canada, lives in Vancouver.]

 We haven’t progressed beyond where we were when the medium was new, and we won’t. Photography is what its first practitioners said it was—pictures created by the controlled actions of nature, of light reflected from surfaces. 
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