Helmut Gernsheim
[Photographer, collector, and photohistorian, b. 1913, Munich, Germany, d. 1995, Lugano, Switzerland.]
Considering that knowledge of the chemical as well as the optical principles of photography was fairly widespread following Schulze’s experiment (in 1725)... the circumstance that photography was not invented earlier remains the greatest mystery in its history... It had apparently never occurred to any of the multitude of artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who were in the habit of using the camera obscura to try to fix its image permanently.
Gustave Flaubert
[Writer, b. 1821, Rouen, Seine-Maritime, France, d. 1880, Rouen, France.]
PHOTOGRAPHY Will make painting obsolete. (See DAGUERREOTYPE.)
(From “The Dictionary of Received Ideas,” assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)
Douglas Huebler
[Photographer and artist, b. 1924, Ann Arbor, Michigan, d. 1997, Truro, Massachusetts.]
I use the camera as a “dumb” copying device that only serves to document whatever phenomenon appears before it through the conditions set by a system. No “esthetic” choices are possible. Other people often make the photographs. It makes no difference.
Berenice Abbott
[Photographer, writer, teacher, b. 1898, Springfield, Ohio, d. 1991, Monson, Maine.]
The more you do, the more you realize there is to do, what a vast object the metropolis is, and how the work of photographing could go on forever.
Robert Mapplethorpe
[Photographer, b. 1946, Floral Park, Long Island, d. 1989, Boston, Massachusetts.]
I went into photography because it seemed like the perfect vehicle for commenting on the madness of today’s existence.
Grant Mudford
[Photographer, b. 1944, Sydney, Australia, lives in Los Angeles.]
I think one of the shortcomings of reality, of real experience, is most people’s inability to examine something carefully and thoughtfully without moving around or being distracted by something else. What photography does really is it forces you to examine something you normally wouldn’t.
David Maisel
[Photographer, b. 1961, New York, lives in San Francisco.]
It’s the work that gets under my skin, that somehow threatens me—that is the work that actually matters and has a lasting influence.
