Larry Clark
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1943, Tulsa, Oklahoma, lives in New York.]
I always wished I could be a painter or a filmmaker, anything but a fucking photographer. I certainly didn’t want to be in a photography gallery.
Vincent Van Gogh
[Artist, b. 1853, Zundert, Netherlands, d. 1890, Auvers-sur-Oise, France.]
I always think photographs abominable, and I don’t like to have them around, particularly not those of persons I know and love... photographic portraits wither much sooner than we ourselves do, whereas the painted portrait is a thing which is felt, done with love or respect for the human being that is portrayed.
Paul Delaroche
[Artist, b. 1797, Paris, d. 1856, Paris.]
From today painting is dead.
(Attributed, 1839)
Weegee (Usher Fellig)
[Photographer, b. 1899, Zlothew near Lemberg, Austrian Galicia (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), d. 1968, New York.]
I can take a camera and paint with it. Nobody has exhausted the possibilities of the camera.
Chuck Close
[Artist, b. 1940, Monroe, Washington, lives in New York.]
The thing that interests me about photography, and why it’s different from all other media, is that it’s the only medium in which there is even the possibility of an accidental masterpiece.
George Bernard Shaw
[Writer, critic, and dramatist, b. 1856, Dublin, d. 1950, Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire, England.]
As to the painters and their fanciers, I snort defiance at them; their day of daubs is over.
(1901)
Thomas Demand
[Photographer, b. 1964, Munich, Germany, lives in Los Angeles.]
…if I’m invited to do a photography show, I tend to say no. The medium itself, I find, is a relatively boring context. You would never see a show about acrylic paint.
Louis Aragon
[Artist, poet, and writer, b. 1897, Neuilly, France, d. 1982, Paris.]
As we know, cubism was a reaction on the part of painters to the invention of photography. Photography and cinema made struggling for exact
likeness childish.
(1935)
