Hiroshi Sugimoto
[Photographer, b. 1948, Tokyo, lives in New York.]
I didn’t want to be criticized for taking low-quality photographs, so I tried to reach the best, highest quality of photography and then to combine this with a conceptual art practice. But thinking back, that was the wrong decision [laughs]. Developing a low-quality aesthetic is a sign of serious fine art—I still see this.
Ilse Bing
[Photographer, b. 1899, Frankfurt, Germany, d. 1998, New York.]
I didn’t choose photography; it chose me. I didn’t know it at the time. An artist doesn’t think first then do it, he is driven.
Helen Levitt
[Photographer, b. 1918, New York, d. 2009, New York.]
It would be mistaken to suppose that any of the best photography is come at by intellection; it is like all art, essentially the result of an intuitive process, drawing on all that the artist is rather than on anything he thinks, far less theorizes about.
Peter Henry Emerson
[Writer and photographer, b. 1856, LaPalma, Cuba, d. 1936, Falmouth, Cornwall, England.]
“A photograph,” it has been said, “shows the art of nature rather that the art of the artist.” This is mere nonsense, as the same remark might by applied equally to all the fine arts. Nature does not jump into the camera, focus itself, expose itself, develop itself, and print itself.
(1889)
Vito Acconci
[Artist, b. 1940, Bronx, New York, lives in Brooklyn, New York.]
...people talking about a famous artwork have often seen only photographs of it. So some of us started asking, “Where does the art reside? In that unique object, or in the photographs?”
Richard Prince
[Artist, b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone, lives in New York.]
Advertising images aren’t associated with an author. It’s as if their presence were complete—classical in fact. They are too good to be true. They look like they have no history to them—like they showed up all at once. They look like what art always wants to look like.
Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]
In response to the question, “What's new?” we can answer with conviction that photography is new. We can make this claim not because it was invented rather recently, and not primarily because of photography’s changing technology (there are forms of art with more advanced hardware), but because photography is by its nature forced toward doing the old job of art—of discovering and revealing meaning from within the confusing detail of life.
Janet Malcolm
[Writer, b. 1934, Prague, Czechoslovakia, lives in New York.]
Straight photography—whatever it is—is hardly exemplified by peppers like clenched fists, thighs like shells, shells like vulvas, cloud formations like elongated torsos, palm trunks like industrial smokestacks—forms that [Edward] Weston saw because he had seen modern art.
