Ellsworth Kelly
[Artist, b. 1923, Newburgh, New York, d. 2015, Spencertown, New York.]
Photography isolates the world via an aperture and gives the photographer the means to see differently, to achieve a spontaneous vision that is direct and uncompromising.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
To take photographs means to recognize—simultaneously and within a fraction of a second—both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one’s head, one’s eye and one’s heart on the same axis.
Joel Meyerowitz
[Photographer, b. 1938, New York, lives in New York.]
On the street each successive wave brings a whole new cast of characters, You take wave after wave, you bathe in it. There is something exciting about being in the crowd, in all that chance and change—its tough out there—but if you can keep paying attention something will reveal itself—just a split second—and then there’s a crazy cockeyed picture.
John Berger
[Writer and critic, b. 1926, London, d. 2017, Paris.]
A photograph is evidence of an encounter between event and photographer. A drawing slowly questions an event’s appearance and in doing so reminds us that appearances are always a construction with a history.
Marius de Zayas
[Artist, b. 1880, Veracruz, Mexico, d. 1961, Greenwich, Connecticut.]
The photographer—the true photographer—is he who has become able, through a state of perfect consciousness, to possess such a clear view of things as to enable him to understand and feel the beauty of the reality of Form.
(1913)
David Hockney
[Artist, b. 1937, Bradford, England, lives in Bridlington, Yorkshire; London; and Los Angeles.]
When is the present? When did the past end and the present occur, and when does the future start? Ordinary photography has one way of seeing only, which is fixed, as if there is kind of an objective reality, which simply cannot be. Picasso... knew that every time you look there’s something different. There is so much there but we're not seeing it, that’s the problem.
Raoul Hausmann
[Artist, b. 1886, Vienna, d. 1971, Limoges, France.]
To be a photographer is to become aware of visible appearances and at the same time acquire from them an education in individual and common optical aperception. Why? Because every individual sees in his own way but see little more than images shaped by the cultural standards of a given period.
Jayne Anne Phillips
[Writer, b. 1952, Buckhannon, West Virginia, lives in Boston, Massachusetts.]
We take language into our minds; we read words in the same internal voice with which we think, remember, pray. But when we look at paintings or photographs, the reverse is true. If the image corresponds to our most intensely personal, yet archetypal, yearnings and memories, we don’t take the image in, we move out of ourselves into the image, as though it were another world, a hologram whose forms of light are ghostly angels, or a dream whose physical reality is suggested by what we see on the surface of a canvas or a page. We connect with the image as though we had lost it within our own memories and are now surprised to find it represented outside ourselves, vital and luminous, charged with energy.
