Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
I think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody’s face in a photograph. The magic is in seeing people in new ways.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
Lars Tunbjörk
[Photographer, b. 1956, Borås, Sweden, d. 2015, Stockholm.]
Everything gets filtered through the artist’s eyes.
Olafur Eliasson
[Artist, b. 1967, Copenhagen, Denmark, lives in Berlin, Germany.]
I want to expose and evaluate the fact that the seeing and sensing process is a system that should not be taken for granted as natural—it’s a cultivated means of “reality” production that, as a system, can be negotiated and changed.
Henri Matisse
[Artist, b. 1869, Le Cateau-Cambrésis, France, d. 1954, Nice, France.]
Everything that we see in our daily lives is more or less distorted by acquired habits and this is perhaps more evident in an age like ours when cinema posters and magazines present us every day with a flood of ready-made images which are to the eye what prejudices are to the mind. The effort to see things without distortion demands a kind of courage; and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he were seeing it for the first time.
Josef Koudelka
[Photographer, b. 1938, Biskovice, Moravia, Czechoslovakia, lives in Paris.]
I don’t pretend to be an intellectual or a philosopher. I just look.
Bill Brandt
[Photographer, b. 1904, Hamburg, Germany, d. 1983, London.]
See the subject first. Do not try to force it to be a picture of this, that or the other thing. Stand apart from it. Then something will happen.
Victor Burgin
[Artist and writer, b. 1941, Sheffield, England, lives in London.]
To remain long with a single image is to risk the loss of our imaginary command of the look, to relinquish it to that absent other to whom it belongs by right—the camera. The image then no longer received our look, reassuring us of our founding centrality, it rather, as it were, avoids our gaze, confirming its allegiance to the other.
