Bill Brandt
[Photographer, b. 1904, Hamburg, Germany, d. 1983, London.]

 Photographers should follow their own judgment, and not the fads and dictates of others. Photography is still a very new medium and everything is allowed and everything should be tried and dared... Photography has no rules. It is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it was achieved. 

Dorothea Lange
[Photographer, b. 1895, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1965, San Francisco.]

 I’m always pushing in many directions at once, always trying to overreach myself. It keeps me constantly restless, and probing and fractured. However, that way of working engenders a very good kind of fatigue, because it keeps you alive. You may be exhausted by the complexities of your existence, but there’s no retreat in it. You are right out on the thin edge all the time, where you are unprotected and defenseless. 

Anton Corbijn
[Photographer, b. 1955, Strijen, Netherlands, lives in London.]

 My biggest fear always is that I’ll photograph an idea rather than a person, so I try to be quite sensitive to how people are. 

Jerry Uelsmann
[Photographer, b. 1934, Detroit, Michigan, lives in Gainesville, Florida.]

 I’m really very concerned with helping to create an attitude of freedom and daring toward the craft of photography. 

Wolfgang Tillmans
[Photographer, b. 1968, Remscheid, Germany, lives in London.]

 If you go into a shoot with an idea, you only get that idea and you cut yourself off from the chance of getting a much better picture. And I guess that’s the problem that a lot of photographers probably have—that they don’t trust the situation they are putting themselves into. So they have a safety net and they don’t even try to leave that. But I find it intriguing to expose myself to somebody that I’ve not met, and see what happens. 

Sally Mann
[Photographer, b. 1951, Lexington, Virginia, lives in Lexington.]

 Sometimes, when I get a good picture, it feels like I have taken another nervous step into increasingly rarified air. Each good-news picture, no matter how hard-earned, allows me only a crumbling foothold on this steepening climb—an ascent whose milestones are fear and doubt. 
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