Alfred Stieglitz
[Photographer and curator, b. 1864, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1946, New York.]
I am at last photographing again... It is straight... No sentimentalism. Not old nor new—It is so sharp you can see the [pores] in a face—& yet it is abstract.
Thomas Ruff
[Photographer, b. 1958, Zell, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf, Germany.]
Actually, I still find it a bit strange that artists working in the early ‘80s would take their theoretical point of departure in philosophical texts from the ‘60s. I was always optimistic enough to think that artists would stick their noses a little bit further into the future and that the theoreticians would formulate things afterward.
Lady Elizabeth Eastlake (Elizabeth Rigby)
[Writer and photographer, b. 1809, London, d. 1893, London.]
[Photography] is made for the present age, in which the desire for art resides in small minority, but the craving, or rather the necessity for cheap, prompt, and correct facts in the public at large. Photography is the purveyor of such knowledge to the world. She is the sworn witness of everything presented to her view.
(1857)
Douglas Crimp
[Writer, theorist and critic, b. 1944, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, lives in Rochester, New York.]
...a great number of [photographic modes]... have to do with reproduction, with copies, and with copies of copies. The peculiar presence of this work is effected through absence, through its unbridgeable distance from the original, from even the possibility of an original.
Edward Weston
[Photographer, b. 1886, Highland Park, Illinois, d. 1958, Wildcat Hill, California.]
Photography is of today. It is a marvelous extension of our own vision; it sees more than the eye sees.
(1926)
Alvin Langdon Coburn
[Photographer, b. 1882, Boston, Massachusetts, d. 1966, Wales.]
Photography is the most modern of the arts, its development and practical usefulness extends back only into the memory of living men; in fact it is more suited to the art requirements of this age of scientific achievement than any other.
(1908)
Abelardo Morell
[b. 1948, Havana, Cuba, lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.]
I want my photographs to reflect a time when science, art, philosophy, and religion were closer brothers and sisters, as they were during Fox Talbot’s time.
Aaron Siskind
[Photographer, b. 1903, New York, d. 1991, Providence, Rhode Island.]
As the language or vocabulary of photography has been extended, the emphasis of meaning has shifted, shifted from what the world looks like to what we feel about the world and what we want the world to mean.
(1958)
