Paul Cezanne
[Artist, b. 1839, Aix-en-Provence, France, d. 1906, Aix, France.]
Everything is about to disappear. You’ve got to hurry up if you still want to see things.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing. It is not seeing itself.
Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.
Shomei Tomatsu
[Photographer, b. 1930, Nagoya, Japan, d. 2012, Okinawa, Japan.]
Sometimes a photographer is a passenger, sometimes a person who stays in one place. What he watches changes constantly, but his watching never changes. He doesn’t examine like a doctor, defend like a lawyer, analyze like a scholar, support like a priest, make people laugh like a comedian, or intoxicate like a singer. He only watches. This is enough. No, this is all I can do. All a photographer can do is watch. Therefore, a photographer has to watch all the time. He must face the object and make his entire body an eye. A photographer is someone who wagers everything on seeing.
Saul Leiter
[Photographer, b. 1923, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, d. 2013, New York.]
Seeing is a neglected enterprise.
Wright Morris
[Writer and photographer, b. 1910, Central City, Nebraska, d. 1998, Mill Valley, California.]
[We] make images to see clearly: then we see clearly what we have made.
Alphonse Bertillon
[Police officer, biometrics researcher, “inventor” of the criminal mug shot, b. 1853, Paris, d. 1914, Münsterlingen, Switzerland.]
We can only see what we are looking for and we look for what is already in our minds.
Anaïs Nin
[Writer, b. 1903, Neuilly, France, d. 1977, Los Angeles.]
We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.
