Man Ray (Emanuel Radnitsky)
[Artist, b. 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1976, Paris.]
If I’d had the nerve, I’d have become a thief or a gangster, but since I didn’t, I became a photographer.
Chuck Close
[Artist, b. 1940, Monroe, Washington, lives in New York.]
I’ve always thought that problem solving is highly overrated and that problem creation is far more interesting.
Wright Morris
[Writer and photographer, b. 1910, Central City, Nebraska, d. 1998, Mill Valley, California.]
[We] make images to see clearly: then we see clearly what we have made.
Richard Prince
[Artist, b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone, lives in New York.]
We do not make art. We have unnamable motors and dangerous impulses that occupy our thoughts.
Paul Graham
[Photographer, b. 1956, Stafford, England, lives in New York.]
The “decisive moment” is bullshit. There are ten pictures before and ten pictures after every one of them: [Henri Cartier-Bresson] actually took thirty pictures of people leaping over that puddle.
Tina Barney
[Photographer, b. 1945, New York, lives in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, and New York.]
My theory is, the more pictures you take, the better you get. It’s like a sport. I never wait to get a particular shot because wonderful accidents can happen when you shoot a lot.
Ishiuchi Miyako
[Photographer, b. 1947, Gunma Prefecture, Japan, lives in Tokyo.]
The natural choice is to photograph what you like. I chose what I hated.
Joe Rosenthal
[Photographer, b. 1911, Washington, D.C., d. 2006, Novato, California.]
Had I posed that shot, I would, of course, have ruined it. I’d have picked fewer men... I would also have made them turn their heads so that they could be identified for AP members throughout the country and nothing like the existing picture would have resulted.
(On his photograph of U.S. Marines raising the American flag on Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima.)
