Georgia O'Keeffe
[Artist, b. 1887, Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, d. 1986, Santa Fe, New Mexico.]
If they had known what a close relationship he would have needed to photograph [them] the way he photographed me—I think they wouldn’t have been interested.
(On men who wanted Alfred Stieglitz to photograph their wives or girlfriends, 1922.) 
Cindy Sherman
[Artist, b. 1954, Glen Ridge, New Jersey, lives in New York.]
To pick a character like that was about my own ambivalence about sexuality—growing up with the women role models that I had, and a lot of them in films, that were like that character, and yet you were supposed to be a good girl.
Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do—that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it I felt very perverse.
John Tagg
[Writer, theorist, and photohistorian, b. 1949, North Shields, England, lives in Ithica, New York.]
There is something morbid about looking at pictures, something frigid, and something furtive. We shuffle from one image to the next like buyers of old books. Once I imagined a collective looking, arguing out aloud. But the exhibiting institutions allow no space for such a practice. Now, like the other johns, I move from one picture to another, alone.
Michael Ondaatje
[Writer, b. 1943, Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), lives in Toronto, Canada.]
You can see that the care he took defiling the beauty he had forced in them was as precise and clean as his good hands which at night had developed the negatives, floating the sheets in the correct acids and watching the faces and breasts and pubic triangles and sofas emerge. The making and destroying coming from the same source, same lust, same surgery his brain was capable of.
(On New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq)
Ellen von Unwerth
[Photographer, b. 1954, Frankfurt, Germany, lives in New York.]
A sexy picture can come from anyone who forms an intimacy with their subject. You can take a sexy picture of your cat if you want to.
Hugh Hefner
[Publisher and playboy, b. 1926, Chicago, d. 2017, Los Angeles.]
I suggested that sex was not the enemy, that violence was the enemy, that nice girls like sex. The centerfold itself, the girl-next-door-centerfold, in a very simplistic way was rooted in that philosophy, that that sex is okay, it’s a natural part of life, a very radical idea in America...
Barbara DeGenevieve
[Photographer, artist, and curator, b. 1947, d. 2014, Chicago, Illinois.]
As an academic I feel I should intellectualize and theoretically analyze when all I really want to do is let the work take me somewhere, manipulate me, and then rough me up a bit. When it comes right down to it, I only want to spend time with work that makes me think and teaches me something while making my body react.
