Edward Weston
[Photographer, b. 1886, Highland Park, Illinois, d. 1958, Wildcat Hill, California.]
Photography, not soft gutless painting, is best equipped to bore into the spirit of today.
Man Ray (Emanuel Radnitsky)
[Artist, b. 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1976, Paris.]
There is no progress in art, any more than there is in making love.
Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Some of the young photographers today enter photography where I leave off. My “grandchildren” astound me. What I worked for they seem born with. So I wonder where their affirmations of Spirit will lead.
(1968)
Pipilotti Rist
[Artist, b. 1962, Reinthal, Switzerland, lives in Zurich and Los Angeles.]
Fifty years ago, the spoken word reigned, but during the last fifty years, the power has gone over to pictures.
Brian Duffy
[Photographer, b. 1933, London, d. 2010, London.]
Photography was dead by 1972. Everything had been resolved between 1839 and 1972. Every picture after ‘72, I have seen pre-‘72. Nothing new. But it took me some time to detect its death. The first person who twigged was Henri Cartier-Bresson. He just stopped—and started painting and drawing. God, he was useless.
Aleksander Rodchenko
[Artist, designer, architect, b. 1891, St. Petersburg, d. 1956, Moscow.]
Damn it, nobody knows what is beautiful and what is not. They do not understand new things.
Maggie Steber
[Photographer, b. 1949, born in Electra, Texas, lives in Miami, Florida.]
Every time we click the shutter, it’s like a new day, a new chance to make a clean start, to be original. It’s a very exciting and exhausting thing to do.
Chuck Close
[Artist, b. 1940, Monroe, Washington, lives in New York.]
It always amazes me that just when I think there’s nothing left to do in photography and that all permutations and possibilities have been exhausted, someone comes along and puts the medium to new use, and makes it his or her own, yanks it out of this kind of amateur status, and makes it as profound and as moving and as formally interesting as any other medium.
