Alfred Stieglitz
[Photographer and curator, b. 1864, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1946, New York.]
Photography is a much more wonderful medium of expression than its staunchest adherents realize today... It is to those who understand nature and love it, who love photography, that the future will bring about revelations little dream of today.
(1918) 
Aaron Siskind
[Photographer, b. 1903, New York, d. 1991, Providence, Rhode Island.]
I may be wrong, but the essentially illustrative nature of most documentary photography, and the worship of the object per se in our best nature photography is not enough to satisfy the man of today, compounded as he is of Christ, Freud, Marx. The interior drama is the meaning of the exterior event. And each man is an essence and a symbol.
Eliot Porter
[Photographer, b. 1901, Winnetka, Illinois, d. 1990, Santa Fe, New Mexico.]
Much is missed if we have eyes only for the bright colors. Nature should be viewed without distinction... She makes no choice herself; everything that happens has equal significance. Nothing can be dispensed with. This is a common mistake that many people make: They think that half of nature can be destroyed—the uncomfortable half—while still retaining the acceptable and the pleasing side.
Henry Peach Robinson
[Photographer, b. 1830, Ludlow, Shropshire, England, d. 1901, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England.]
I must warn you against a too close study of art to the exclusion of nature and the suppression of original thought... Art rules should be a guide only to the study of nature, and not a set of fetters to confine the ideas or to depress the faculty of original interpretation in the artist, whether he be painter or photographer.
(1867)
Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
I have often photographed when I am not in tune with nature but the photographs look as if I had been. So I conclude that something in nature says, “Come and take my photograph.” So I do, regardless of how I feel.
Karl Blossfeldt
[Photographer, b. 1865, Schielo, Germany, d. 1932, Berlin.]
My botanical documents should contribute to restoring the link with nature. They should reawaken a sense of nature, point to its teeming richness of form, and prompt the viewer to observe for himself the surrounding plant world.
Eadweard Muybridge (Edward James Muggeridge)
[Photographer, b. 1830, Kingston-on-Thames, England, d. 1904, Woking, England.]
…we have become so accustomed to see [the galloping horse] in art that it imperceptibly dominated our understanding, and we think the representation to be unimpeachable, until we throw off all our preconceived impressions on one side, and seek the truth by independent observation from Nature herself.
(1898)
Fred Hoyle
[Astronomer and writer, b. 1915, Bingley, Yorkshire, England, d. 2001, Bournemouth, England.]
Well, we now have such a photograph... Has any new idea been let loose? It certainly has. You will have noticed how suddenly everybody has become seriously concerned to protect the natural environment... It seems to me more than a coincidence that this awareness should have happened at exactly the moment man took his first step into space.
