Erwin Blumenfeld
[Photographer, b. 1897, Berlin, Germany, d. 1969, Rome, Italy.]
Beauty is not pretty.
Daido Moriyama
[Photographer, b. 1938, Ikeda-cho, Osaka, Japan, lives in Tokyo.]
Until a few years ago, I was able to stave off an awareness that there is not an ounce of beauty in the world, and that humanity is a thing of extreme hideousness. So I could shoot and believe in something.
(1972)
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
The history of photography could be recapitulated as the struggle between two different imperatives: beautification,... and truth-telling.
Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
A garbage can, occasionally, to me at least, can be beautiful. That’s because you’re seeing. Some people are able to see that—see it and feel it. I lean toward the enchantment, the visual power, of the esthetically rejected subject.
Italo Calvino
[Writer, b. 1923, Santiago de la Vegas, Cuba, d. 1985, Siena, Italy.]
The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow.
Ingrid Sischy
[Editor and writer, b. 1952, Johannesburg, South Africa, d. 2015, New York.]
Beautification of tragedy results in pictures that ultimately reinforce our passivity toward the experience they reveal.
Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
...you don’t put an object in a museum because it’s beautiful; an object is beautiful because you put it in a museum. Everything is photogenic once it has been photographed.
Ernst Haas
[Photographer, b. 1921, Vienna, Austria, d. 1986, New York City.]
All I wanted was to connect my moods with those of Paris. Beauty pains and when it pained most, I shot.
