Aaron Siskind
[Photographer, b. 1903, New York, d. 1991, Providence, Rhode Island.]

 The only nature I’m interested in is my own nature. 

Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]

 Nature photography… that acknowledges what is wrong, is admittedly sometimes hard to bear—it has to encompass our mistakes. Yet in the long run, it is important; in order to endure our age of apocalypse, we have to be reconciled not only to avalanche and hurricane, but to ourselves. 

John Szarkowski
[Curator, critic, historian, and photographer, b. 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, d. 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]

 To photograph beautifully a choice vestigial remnant of natural landscape is not necessarily to do a great favor to its future.... It is difficult today for an ambitious young photographer to photograph a pristine snowcapped mountain without including the parking lot in the foreground as a self-protecting note of irony. 

Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]

 Many have asked, pointing incredulously toward a sweep of tract homes and billboards, why picture that? The question sounds simple, but it implies a difficult issue—why open our eyes anywhere but in undamaged places like national parks? 

Paul Caponigro
[Photographer, b. 1932, Boston, Massachusetts, lives in Cushing, Maine.]

 Photography is a medium, a language through which I might come to experience directly the interaction between myself and nature. 

Ralph Steiner
[Photographer, b. 1899, Cleveland, Ohio, d. 1986, Hanover, New Hampshire.]

 I say to young photographers, “What in God’s name are you doing, taking a picture of a tree or a mountain? That’s crazy! What you should do is take a person by the hand and show him the tree or the mountain itself. Why show him a stupid picture? It’s flat and it’s tiny compared to the mountain. The mountain is magnificent and has power ...” 

Albert Renger-Patzsch
[Artist, b. 1897, Würzburg, Bavaria, Germany, d. 1966, Wamel Dorf, Über Soest, West Germany.]

 There is an urgent need to examine old opinions and look at things from a new viewpoint. There must be an increase in the joy one takes in an object, and the photographer should become fully conscious of the splendid fidelity of reproduction made possible by his technique. Nature, after all, is not so poor that she requires constant improvement. 

Rosalind Krauss
[Writer, critic, and historian, b. 1941, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]

 The frame announces that between the part of reality that was cut away and this part there is a difference; and that this segment which the frame frames is an example of nature-as-representation, nature-as-sign. 
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