André Malraux
[Writer, critic, and politician, b. 1901, Paris, d. 1975, Paris.]
The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.
Lewis Hine
[Photographer, writer, and reformer, b. 1874, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, d. 1940, New York.]
I have always been more interested in persons than in people.
André Bazin
[Film critic and theorist, b. 1918, Angers, France, d. 1958, Nogent-sur-Marne, Île-de-France, France.]
All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence.
Harry Callahan
[Photographer, b. 1912, Detroit, Michigan, d. 1999, Atlanta, Georgia.]
Everything was Bauhaus this and Bauhaus that. I wanted to break it... I got tired of experimentation. I got sick of the solarization and reticulation and walked-on negatives. What I was interested in was the technique of seeing... I introduced problems like “evidence of man,” and talking to people—making portraits on the street... I thought [the students] should enter into dealings with human beings and leave abstract photography. I felt that social photography would be the next concern.
Leonard Freed
[Photographer, b. 1929, Brooklyn, New York, d. 2006, Garrison, New York.]
Men die, heroically or fruitlessly, but man carries on. In Israel it is the same: the farmer must till the fields, the young must make love, and the photographer must, I suppose, be ready to photograph it all.
Annette Messager
[Artist, b. 1943, Berck-sur-Mer, France, lives in Paris.]
A lot of people think my work is about sex, or people say I am just looking at just one part of the body, because the genitalia are included. That is silly because there are eyes, there are noses, and ears, too. The sexual parts of the body that I photograph are just one thing. But, we have sex, too!
Marshall McLuhan
[Writer and theorist, b. 1911, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, d. 1980, Toronto, Canada.]
Nobody can commit photography alone.
Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that’s what people observe. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.
