Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon)
[Photographer, b. 1820, Paris, d. 1910, Paris.]

 As for the portrait, it is time to have done with the reproach that the photographer cannot convey so well as the painter the intimate and artistic feeling of his sitter. The photograph takes the law into its own hands. Psychological insight is not reserved for painters alone and they know it. (1856) 

Lady Elizabeth Eastlake (Elizabeth Rigby)
[Writer and photographer, b. 1809, London, d. 1893, London.]

 Where ten self-styled artists eked out a precarious living by painting inferior miniatures, ten times that number now earn their bread by supplying photographic portraits. (1857) 

Charles Sheeler
[Artist, b. 1883, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1965, Dobbs Ferry, New York.]

 My interest in photography, paralleling that in painting, has been based on admiration for its possibility of accounting for the visual world with an exactitude not equaled by any other medium. The difference in the manner of arrival at their destination—the painting being a result of composite image and the photograph being a result of a single image—prevents these media from being competitive. (1939) 

Edgar Allan Poe
[Writer, b. 1809, Boston, Massachusetts, d. 1849, Baltimore, Maryland.]

 If we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear—but the closest scrutiny of the photogenic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented. (1840) 

Oscar Rejlander
[Photographer, b. 1817, Sweden, d. 1875, London.]

 The same way a painter goes if he wishes to paint, a photographer must go if he wishes to make a composition photograph. The two go together; part here to meet again. Fine art consists of many parts, and a photographic composition commenced in this manner must contain many parts in common with art... (1863) 

Eugène Delacroix
[Artist, b. 1798, Charenton-St.Maurice, France, d. 1863, Paris.]

 As far as I am concerned, I can only say how much I regret such an admirable discovery should have come so late! The possibility of studying such images would have had an influence on me that I can only guess at from the usefulness which they have now, even in the little time left me for more intensive study. It is the tangible proof of nature’s own design, which we otherwise see only very feebly. 

D.H. Lawrence
[Writer, b. 1885, Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England, d. 1930, Vence, France.]

 When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can. 
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