Nan Goldin
[Photographer, b. 1953, Washington, D.C., lives in New York and Paris.]
[The snapshot is] the form of photography that is most defined by love. People take them out of love, and they take them to remember—people, places, and times. They’re about creating a history by recording a history.
Jan Saudek
[Photographer, b. 1935, Prague, Czechoslovakia, lives in Prague.]
I still dream of the day when I will take a photograph so beautiful that it can be called love.
Ruth Bernhard
[Photographer, b. 1905, Berlin, d. 2006, San Francisco.]
Fall in love. Every day. With everything. With life. If you can fall in love, you can be a photographer. I think that is absolutely essential.
Eliot Porter
[Photographer, b. 1901, Winnetka, Illinois, d. 1990, Santa Fe, New Mexico.]
But before all else, a work of art is the creation of love. Love for the subject first and for the medium second.... Love is the general criterion by which the rare photograph is judged. It must contain it to be not less than the best of which the photographer is capable.
Jerry Uelsmann
[Photographer, b. 1934, Detroit, Michigan, lives in Gainesville, Florida.]
I have always felt I photographed the things I loved.
Justine Kurland
[Photographer, b. 1969, Warsaw, New York, lives mostly on the road.]
Every adventure I’ve ever had with love and photography has ended in a similar misadventure. As is often the case, the rush of longing detaches from its object of desire, and my photographic ghosts lead me back to myself, alone.
Mario Sorrenti
[Photographer, b. 1971, Naples, Italy, lives in New York.]
Now I love the act of creating a new image. When everything comes together, it feels like ecstasy. It’s like a climax.
Marcel Proust
[Writer, b. 1871, Auteuil, Paris, d. 1922, Paris.]
The questing, anxious, exacting way that we have of looking at the person we love, our eagerness for the word which will give us or take from us the hope of an appointment for the morrow, and, until that word is uttered, our alternate if not simultaneous imaginings of joy and despair, all this makes our attention in the presence of the beloved too tremulous to be able to carry away a very clear impression of her.... the beloved model does not stay still; and our mental photographs of her are always blurred.
