Shomei Tomatsu
[Photographer, b. 1930, Nagoya, Japan, d. 2012, Okinawa, Japan.]
If I could, I would want to see everything: the affairs of others, the scene of a murder, the Pygmies in the African rain forest, the super-rich of Wall Street, the face of the man who stole three hundred million yen, the Sydney Opera House, the graveyard of ships in the Sargasso Sea, the tail of an orca, the plankton of the deep ocean, the inside of Prime Minister Sato’s belly, Mao Zedong, Mars, Cape Kennedy, Antarctic blizzards, the animal whose name is “sloth,” the pudendum of Marilyn Monroe. My eyes are infamously greedy:... to me, the stuff other photographers substitute for seeing is but a kind of pessimism.
Daido Moriyama
[Photographer, b. 1938, Ikeda-cho, Osaka, Japan, lives in Tokyo.]
[My] photos are often out of focus, rough, streaky, warped, etc. But if you think about it, a normal human being will in one day perceive an infinite number of images, and some of them are focused upon, others are barely seen out of the corner of one’s eye.
Theodore Roethke
[Poet, b. 1908, Saginaw, Michigan, d. 1963, Bainbridge Island, Washington.]
I wish I could find an event that meant as much as simple seeing.
Beaumont Newhall
[Photographer, writer, and historian, b. 1908, Lynn, Massachusetts, d. 1993, Santa Fe, New Mexico.]
We are not interested in the unusual, but in the usual seen unusually.
Andres Serrano
[Artist, b. 1950, New York, lives in New York.]
I would not have a problem being called a voyeur. We all vacillate between being spectators and participants in the arena of life. It’s natural to want to see, and to be curious. We are not bad people because of that.
Bill Brandt
[Photographer, b. 1904, Hamburg, Germany, d. 1983, London.]
It is part of the photographer’s job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep in him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time or of the traveler who enters a strange country.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
[Poet, novelist, playwright, and natural philosopher, b. 1749, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, d. 1832, Weimar, Germany.]
The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.
(Maxim often quoted by Albert Renger-Patzsch.)
Wolfgang Tillmans
[Photographer, b. 1968, Remscheid, Germany, lives in London.]
I think it’s much more radical to see and show things as they look instead of making them somehow subversive through alienation or estrangement.
