David Hockney
[Artist, b. 1937, Bradford, England, lives in Bridlington, Yorkshire; London; and Los Angeles.]
I believe that the very process of looking can make a thing beautiful.
Friedrich Nietzsche
[Philosopher, b. 1844, Rocken, Prussia, d. 1900, Weimar, Germany.]
To experience a thing as beautiful means: to experience it necessarily wrongly.
Jeff Wall
[Photographer, b. 1946, Vancouver, Canada, lives in Vancouver.]
The spontaneous is the most beautiful thing that can appear in a picture, but nothing in art appears less spontaneously than that.
Aleksander Rodchenko
[Artist, designer, architect, b. 1891, St. Petersburg, d. 1956, Moscow.]
Damn it, nobody knows what is beautiful and what is not. They do not understand new things.
Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
If you look at a photograph, and you think, “My isn’t that a beautiful photograph,” and you go on to the next one, or “Isn’t that nice light?” So what? I mean what does it do to you or what’s the real value in the long run? What do you walk away from it with? I mean, I’d much rather show you a photograph that makes demands on you, that you might become involved in on your own terms or be perplexed by.
David Levi Strauss
[Writer and critic, b. 1953, Junction City, Kansas, lives in New York.]
The idea that the more transformed or ‘aestheticized’ an image is, the less ‘authentic’ or valuable it becomes, is one that needs to be seriously questioned. Why can’t beauty be a call to action?
Bill Cunningham
[Fashion photographer, b. 1929, Boston, Massachusetts, d. 2016, New York.]
He who seeks beauty will find it.
Robert Mapplethorpe
[Photographer, b. 1946, Floral Park, Long Island, d. 1989, Boston, Massachusetts.]
I’m not after beauty, I’m after perfection, and they’re not always the same.
