Mary Ellen Mark
[Photographer, b. 1940, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, d. 2015, New York.]
If you are interested in photography because you love it and are obsessed with it, you must be self-motivated, a perfectionist, and relentless.
Jeff Koons
[Artist, b. 1955, York, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
Sex with love is a higher state. It’s an objective state, in which one lives and enters the eternal, and I believe that’s what I showed people. That’s why it wasn’t pornographic.
(On the hard-core self-portraits he made having sex with his wife Ilona “Cicciolina” Staller and exhibited under the title “Made in Heaven.”)
Sheila Metzner
[Photographer, b. 1939, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New York.]
I’m just a photographer. I’ve been on this journey that started with photographing what I loved the most, and what I loved the most.
Ansel Adams
[Photographer, b. 1902, San Francisco, d. 1984, Carmel, California.]
Some photographers take reality... and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation.
Orlan (Mireille Suzanne Francette Porte)
[Artist, b. 1947, St. Etienne, France, lives in Ivry-sur-Seine, France.]
Being a narcissist isn’t easy when the question is not of loving your own image, but of recreating the self through deliberate acts of alienation.
Annette Messager
[Artist, b. 1943, Berck-sur-Mer, France, lives in Paris.]
[Love] can be found in making little dresses for stuffed birds, or in a garden of tenderness like I have done— mixing writing, photography, and real spaces. There are all kinds of acts of love.
Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]
Photographers who can teach us to love even vacant lots will do so out of the same sense of wholeness that inspired the wilderness photographers of the last twenty-five years (the deepest joy possible in wilderness is, most would agree, the mysterious realization of one’s alliance with it). Beauty, Coleridge wrote, is based in “the unity of the manifold, the coalescence of the diverse.” In this large sense, beautiful photographs of contemporary America will lead us out into daily life by giving us a new understanding of and tolerance for what previously seemed only anarchic and threatening.
Joel-Peter Witkin
[Photographer, b. 1939, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.]
People who hate what I make hate me, too. They must think I am a demon or some kind of evil sorcerer. Those who understand what I do appreciate the determination, love, and courage it takes to find wonder and beauty in people who are considered by society to be damaged, unclean, dysfunctional, or wretched.
