Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
...we do not form our beliefs on the basis of what we see; rather, what we see is often determined by our beliefs.
Wright Morris
[Writer and photographer, b. 1910, Central City, Nebraska, d. 1998, Mill Valley, California.]
The camera eye is the one in the middle of our forehead, combining how we see with what there is to be seen.
Michael Heizer
[Artist, b. 1944, Berkeley, California, lives in Hiko, Nevada.]
I have looked at so many photographs, I can not see them anymore.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
A lot of people in the early decades of photography tried to treat it as if it were simply some kind of copying machine, as an aid in reproducing or dispensing a certain kind of visual information, but not itself as an independent source of seeing or of material that would fundamentally change our visual sensibility, as, in fact, it has.
Mary Ellen Mark
[Photographer, b. 1940, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, d. 2015, New York.]
I don’t think you can develop or learn a “way of seeing” or a “point of view.” A “way of seeing” is who you are, how you think and how you create images. It is something that is inside of you. It’s how you look at the world.
Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
To see through, not merely with, the eye, to perceive with the inner eye, and by an act of choice to capture the essence of that perception. This is the very core of the creative process.
Eliot Porter
[Photographer, b. 1901, Winnetka, Illinois, d. 1990, Santa Fe, New Mexico.]
You learn to see by practice. It’s just like playing tennis, you get better the more you play. The more you look around at things, the more you see. The more you photograph, the more you realize what can be photographed and what can’t be photographed. You just have to keep doing it.
Theodore Roethke
[Poet, b. 1908, Saginaw, Michigan, d. 1963, Bainbridge Island, Washington.]
The eye, of course, is not enough. But the outer eye serves the inner eye, that’s the point.
