Brian Eno
[Musician, composer, artist, b. 1948, Woodbridge, England, lives in Suffolk, England.]
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature... The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
In some way I would suggest that photography is not so much an art as a meta-art. It’s an art which devours other art... photography takes the whole world as its subject, cannibalizes all art forms, and converts them into images. And in that sense it seems a peculiarly modern art form.
Thomas Ruff
[Photographer, b. 1958, Zell, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf, Germany.]
Photographs are still always depictions, it's just that for my generation the model for the photograph is probably not reality any more, but images we have of that reality.
Tristan Tzara (Sami Rosenstock)
[Writer and artist, b. 1896, Moineti, Bacu, Romania, d. 1963, Paris.]
When everything that is called art was well and truly riddled with rheumatism, the photographer lit the thousands of candles whose power is contained in his flame, and the sensitive paper absorbed by degrees the blackness cut out of some ordinary object. He had invented a fresh and tender flash of lightning.
Edward Weston
[Photographer, b. 1886, Highland Park, Illinois, d. 1958, Wildcat Hill, California.]
Since it has the validity of a new expression, without traditions or conventions, the freshness of an experimental epoch, the strength of pioneering, photography has a significant status in the life of today.
(1928)
Geoffrey Batchen
[Photohistorian, b. 1956, Australia, lives in Wellington, New Zealand.]
Photography apparently figures time itself as a progressive linear movement from past to future. The present during which we look at the photographic image is but a staging point, a hallucinatory hovering that imbricates
both past and future.
Kansuke Yamagata
[Photographer and poet, b. 1914, Nagoya, Japan, d. 1987, Nagoya.]
What is a good photograph?... To put it concisely, good photos aim at revolution... They emerge from everyday events and connect to revolution.
Gueorgui Pinkhassov
[Photographer, b. 1952, Moscow, lives in Paris.]
The only thing that counts is curiosity. For me personally, this is what creativity is about. It will express itself less in the fear of doing the same thing over again than in the desire not to go where one has already been.
