Louis Aragon
[Artist, poet, and writer, b. 1897, Neuilly, France, d. 1982, Paris.]
Today crowds are returning to art by way of photography. With the passionate movements of children at play. With the poses of men caught unawares in their sleep. With the unconscious twitches of people strolling by.
(1936) 
Imogen Cunningham
[Photographer, b. 1883, Portland, d. 1976, San Francisco.]
Ansel once said to somebody that I was versatile, but what he really meant was that I jump around. I’m never satisfied staying in one spot very long. I couldn't stay with the mountains and I couldn’t stay with the trees and I couldn’t stay with the rivers. But I can always stay with people, because they really are different.
Rosalind Krauss
[Writer, critic, and historian, b. 1941, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]
The photographic record is part of the point of... family gatherings; it is an agent in the collective fantasy of family cohesion, and in that sense the camera is a projective tool, part of the theater that the family constructs to convince itself that it is together and whole.
Sheila Metzner
[Photographer, b. 1939, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New York.]
My mother was so poor that she couldn’t afford an encyclopedia so the salesman gave her two volumes from A to E. But in those volumes were Africa, Antarctica, Egypt. From the beginning, the strangeness of mankind was appealing to me, and I wanted to see it myself and document it myself.
David Maisel
[Photographer, b. 1961, New York, lives in San Francisco.]
My sense is that the places I photograph are an outer manifestation of our own psyches. These are not simply the work of some corporate enemy, but rather a reflection of who and what we are collectively, as a society.
Fred Hoyle
[Astronomer and writer, b. 1915, Bingley, Yorkshire, England, d. 2001, Bournemouth, England.]
Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available, we shall, in an emotional sense, acquire an additional dimension... Once let the sheer isolation of the Earth become plain to every man, whatever his nationality or creed, and a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.
(1948)
Danny Lyon
[Photographer, b. 1942, New York, lives in Ulster County, New York.]
I wanted to change history and preserve humanity. But in the process I changed myself and preserved my own.
Thomas Merton
[Writer, monk, and philosopher, b. 1915, Prades, France, d. 1968, Bangkok, Thailand.]
Man is the image of God, not His shadow. At present, we have decided that God is dead, and that we were his shadow... Take a picture of that, Jack!
