Philippe Halsman
[Photographer, b. 1906, Riga, Latvia, d. 1979, New York.]
This fascination with the human face has never left me... Every face I see seems to hide and sometimes, fleetingly, to reveal the mystery of another human being... Capturing this revelation became the goal and passion of my life.
Wim Wenders
[Artist and filmmaker, b. 1945, Düsseldorf, lives in Berlin.]
The most political decision you make is where you direct people’s eyes. In other words, what you show people, day in and day out, is political... And the most politically indoctrinating thing you can do to a human being is to show him, every day, that there can be no change.
Chris Marker
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1921, Neuilly-sur-Seine, Île-de-France, d. 2012, Paris.]
An object dies when the gaze that lights on it has disappeared.
Lord Snowdon (Antony Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones)
[Earl and photographer, b. 1930, London, England, d. 2017, London.]
I believe that photographs should be simple technically, and easy to look at. They shouldn’t be directed at other photographers; their point is to make ordinary people react—to laugh, or to see something they hadn’t taken in before, or to be touched. But not to wince, I think.
Brooks Atkinson
[Writer and critic, b. 1894, Melrose, Massachusetts, d. 1984, New York.]
The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.
Jerry Uelsmann
[Photographer, b. 1934, Detroit, Michigan, lives in Gainesville, Florida.]
The painter does not begin with a fully-conceived canvas, the sculptor with a fully-conceived piece. They allow for a dialogue to evolve, to develop, and as far as I’m concerned the darkroom is truly capable of being of being a visual research laboratory, a place for discovery, observation and meditation.
Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
At that time a lot of the world was oddly obscene to photography—that is it couldn’t be portrayed… There seemed to be a horror of facing the environment that we’d made for ourselves. I felt, “Okay, this is the hand that you’ve dealt me—these are the fruits of mid-period American capitalism that you’ve given us. Well, look at them.
Horst P. Horst (Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann)
[Photographer, b. 1906, Weisenfels/Saale, Germany, d. 1999, Long Island, New York.]
I don’t think photography has anything remotely to do with the brain. It has to do with eye appeal.
