Paul Valéry
[Writer and poet, b. 1871, Sète, France, d. 1945, Paris.]
Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far-off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.
(1939, on the one hundredth anniversary of Daguerre's announcement of photography.) 
Pedro Meyer
[Photographer, b. 1935, Madrid, Spain, lives in Mexico City.]
I no longer have to stand for twelve hours at a time inevitably exposed to all those chemicals in the darkroom. As I grow older and my vision increasingly fails me, I can still make up with experience what I lack in agility out in the field. When geometry and content miss their original appointment, I can try to make up for such a lost encounter. I can, like a gold miner, go back to all my old archives and find countless new veins and find new uses for my previous work.
Lisette Model
[Photographer, b. 1906, Vienna, Austria, d. 1983, New York.]
Speed, the fundamental condition of the activities of our day is the power of photography, indeed the modern art of today, the art of the split second.
Alfred Stieglitz
[Photographer and curator, b. 1864, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1946, New York.]
Just as we stand before the door of a new social era, so we stand in art too before a new medium of expression—the true medium (abstraction).
(1912)
David Levi Strauss
[Writer and critic, b. 1953, Junction City, Kansas, lives in New York.]
One terrible truth about photographs is that they can only ever show us
what happened, never what is happening or will happen. They are always about something that is
gone, and so are in league with death.
Angela Bulloch
[Artist, b. 1966, Fort Francis, Ontario, Canada, lives in London.]
The works often continue to evolve after they have been realized, simply by the fact that they are concerned with an element of change, or an inherent potential for some kind of shift to occur.
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.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
[Artist, photographer, designer, and teacher, b. 1895, Bacsbarsod, Hungary, d. 1946, Chicago, Illinois.]
In photography we possess an extraordinary instrument for reproduction. But photography is much more than that. Today it is [a method for bringing optically] some thing entirely new into the world.
