Lillian Bassman
[Photographer and painter, b. 1917, Brooklyn, New York, d. 2012, New York.]
The women who intrigued me [as models] had the most beautiful necks and the most responsive hand movements. At one point, I found El Greco, and that elongated look became my way of seeing.
Peter Galassi
[Curator and writer, b. 1951, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]
One of the great adventures of modernism began when painters closed the window of Renaissance perspective and contemplated the shuttered field of the picture plane. In theory, the medium of photography—a perfect, mechanical embodiment of perspective—would seem to have had no role to play in such an enterprise. But the photograph is a picture too, and photography’s modernist adventure might be described as a dialogue between the transparency of the open window and the impenetrable surface of the image.
Ansel Adams
[Photographer, b. 1902, San Francisco, d. 1984, Carmel, California.]
I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term—meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching—there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.
Charles Sheeler
[Artist, b. 1883, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1965, Dobbs Ferry, New York.]
Photography is nature seen from the eyes outward, painting from the eyes inward. Photography records inalterably the single image, while painting records a plurality of images willfully directed by the artist.
Alfred Stieglitz
[Photographer and curator, b. 1864, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1946, New York.]
I am not a painter, nor an artist. Therefore I can see straight, and that may be my undoing.
Joseph Kosuth
[Artist and theorist, b. 1945, Toledo, Ohio, lives in New York and Rome.]
Unlike the marks of a painting, the photo seems to organize its ‘opinions’
in relation to the world; even when the photographs have clearly been manipulated, the ‘opinions’ seem to have all the more force, with the suggested ‘participation of the world’ articulating that ‘opinion’ as a difference.
Steve Edwards
[Writer and photohistorian, lives in London.]
The implications of postmodern for photography are immense, most obviously if, pace Saussure, meaning is constructed internal to the frame: then photography becomes exactly like any other form of art. Having excised reference the photograph is reduced to a painting with light.
John Berger
[Writer and critic, b. 1926, London, d. 2017, Paris.]
Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.?
