Ernst Haas
[Photographer, b. 1921, Vienna, Austria, d. 1986, New York City.]
The reporter is someone in a trench coat with a rakishly upturned collar, who runs after events, wants to capture facts, narrates, reports on so-called reality. To be honest, I’m not too interested in facts. My issues are more of an artistic nature. These are rather more the problems of the painter. I’m a painter who was too impatient to paint, and therefore became a photographer.
David Bailey
[Photographer, b. 1938, London, lives in London.]
All pictures are unnatural. All pictures are sad because they're about dead people. Paintings you don’t think of in a special time or with a specific event. With photos I always think I’m looking at something dead.
Secondo Pia
[Lawyer and amateur photographer, b. 1855, Asti, Italy, d. 1941, Milan.]
No human being could have painted this negative that lies hidden in the stains. ... If it was not painted, not made by human hands, then ...
(On his 1898 photograph which highlighted the alleged face in what is known as “the Shroud of Turin.”)
Edward Weston
[Photographer, b. 1886, Highland Park, Illinois, d. 1958, Wildcat Hill, California.]
Only with effort can the camera be forced to lie: basically it is an honest medium: so the photographer is much more likely to approach nature in a spirit of inquiry, of communion, instead of with the saucy swagger of self-dubbed “artists.”
Clement Greenberg
[Critic, b. 1909, New York, d. 1994, New York.]
Photography is the only art that can still afford to be naturalistic and that, in fact, achieves its maximum effect through naturalism. Unlike painting or poetry, it can put all emphasis on an explicit subject, anecdote or message; the artist is permitted, in what is still so relatively mechanical and neutral a medium, to identify the “human interest” of his subject as he cannot in any of the other arts without falling into banality. Therefore it would seem that photography today could take over the field that used to belong to genre and historical painting, and that it does not have to follow painting into areas into which the latter has been driven by force of historical development.
Paul Delaroche
[Artist, b. 1797, Paris, d. 1856, Paris.]
The painter... will find [photography] a rapid way of making collections of studies he could otherwise obtain only with much time and trouble and, whatever his talents might be, in a far less perfect manner.
David Hockney
[Artist, b. 1937, Bradford, England, lives in Bridlington, Yorkshire; London; and Los Angeles.]
Cubism was precisely about saving the possibility of figuration, this ages-old need of human beings going all the way back to Lascaux, and saving that possibility at the moment of its greatest crisis, what with the onslaught of photography with all its false claims to be able to accomplish such figuration better and more objectively. It was about asserting all the things that photography couldn’t capture: time, multiple vantages, and the sense of lived and living experience.
Aaron Siskind
[Photographer, b. 1903, New York, d. 1991, Providence, Rhode Island.]
The only other things I got from the abstract expressionists is the absolute belief that this canvas is the complete total area of struggle, this is the arena, this is where the fight is taking place, the battle. Everybody believes that, but you have to really believe that and work that way.
