Paolo Roversi
[Photographer, b. 1947, Ravenna, Italy, lives in Paris.]
My studio is a place for chance, the dream, the imaginary to prevail. I give these forces as much space as I can.
Beaumont Newhall
[Photographer, writer, and historian, b. 1908, Lynn, Massachusetts, d. 1993, Santa Fe, New Mexico.]
It is peculiar to photography that, by the extreme ease of its production, many accidentally interesting photographs are produced.
Matthew Brady
[Photographer, b. 1823, Warren County, New York, d. 1896, New York.]
Results are uncertain even among the more experienced photographers.
James Agee
[Writer, b. 1909, Knoxville, Tennessee, d. 1955, New York.]
Many people, even some good photographers, talk of the “luck” of photography as if that were a disparagement. And it is true that luck is constantly at work. It is one of the cardinal creative forces in the universe, one which the photographer has unique equipment for collaborating with. And a photographer often shoots around a subject, especially one that is highly mobile and in continuous and swift development—which seems to me as much his natural business as it is for a poet who is really in the grip of his poem to alter and realter words in his line. It is true that most artists, though they know their own talent and its gifts as luck, work as well as they can against luck, and that in most good works of art, as in little else in creation, luck is either locked out or locked in and semidomesticated, or put to wholly constructive work; but it is peculiarly a part of the good photographer’s adventure to know where luck is most likely to lie in the stream, to hook it, and to bring it in without unfair play and without too much subduing it. Most good photographs, especially the quick and lyrical kind, are battles between the artist and luck.
Gabriel Orozco
[Artist, b. 1962, Jalapa, Veracruz, Mexico, lives in New York, Paris, and Mexico City.]
We normally consider stability to be the constant in life and accidents to be the exception, but it’s exactly the opposite. In reality, the accident is the rule and stability is the exception.
Harry Callahan
[Photographer, b. 1912, Detroit, Michigan, d. 1999, Atlanta, Georgia.]
I sort of believe that a picture is like a prayer; you’re offering a prayer to get something, and in a sense it’s like a gift of God because you have practically no control—at least I don’t.
Robbert Flick
[Photographer, b. 1939, Amersfoort, Holland, lives in Los Angeles, California.]
Serendipity plays an enormous role in my work. I create the possibilities for accidents to happen.
Arno Rafael Minkkinen
[Photographer, b. 1945, Helsinki, Finland, lives in Andover, Massachusetts.]
Artists who believe they control everything control what they know. Artists who allow outside forces to intervene are like canoes going down rapids.
