Vik Muniz
[Artist, b. 1961, Sao Paulo, Brazil, lives in New York.]
I hate to say I’m a photographer, because I learned photography as I went along. But I also hate to say I’m a painter, a draftsman, even an artist. I think it’s good when you’re confused about what you are; it means you haven’t defined yourself as an artist yet.
Terence Donovan
[Photographer, b. 1936, Stepney, England, d. 1996, London.]
The problem for an amateur is that he/she has no reason to take a photograph.
Beaumont Newhall
[Photographer, writer, and historian, b. 1908, Lynn, Massachusetts, d. 1993, Santa Fe, New Mexico.]
We are not going to have six million artists because six million people own this Instamatic camera that all you do is just point and shoot. If out of those six million we have six people that are artists, it will be a surprising thing. This does not mean that photography in the hands of the amateur is not a wonderful thing; it is. But we must recognize that the mere ability to get a picture, an image on a piece of paper in color, or in black and white is just the ground work in the beginning of what we call art.
Dorothea Lange
[Photographer, b. 1895, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1965, San Francisco.]
Photography today seems to be in a state of flight... The amateur forces his Sundays into a series of unnatural poses.
Anton Corbijn
[Photographer, b. 1955, Strijen, Netherlands, lives in London.]
... yes, I’ve become a little more professional—which I don’t really want to be but I can’t help it at some point.
John Glenn
[Astronaut and politician, b. 1921, Cambridge, Ohio, lives in Washington D.C.]
To hell with this. I’m going to go down to Cocoa Beach.
(On being told by NASA that he couldn’t take a camera on his historic first space flight, forcing him to make a trip to a Florida drugstore where he bought the Ansco Autoset snapshot camera and two rolls of Kodak film he used on the flight.)
Geoffrey Batchen
[Photohistorian, b. 1956, Australia, lives in Wellington, New Zealand.]
So there is a lacuna in photography’s history, an absence. And we are talking absence not just of vernacular photographies themselves, but of a cogent explanation for that absence.
Bill Owens
[Photographer, b. 1938, San Jose, California, lives in Hayward, California.]
When someone sees me with a camera that weighs almost ten pounds, he assumes immediately that I’m a serious photographer.
