Gabriel Orozco
[Artist, b. 1962, Jalapa, Veracruz, Mexico, lives in New York, Paris, and Mexico City.]
What I’m after is the liquidity of things, how one things leads you on to the rest... The works are about concentration, intention, and paths of thought: the flow of totality in our perception, the fragmentation of the “river of phenomenon.”
Charles Babbage
[Mathematician, analytical philosopher, proto-computer scientist, b. 1791, London, England, d. 1871, London.]
An object is frequently not seen, from not knowing how to see it, rather than from any defect of the organ of vision.
Henry Peach Robinson
[Photographer, b. 1830, Ludlow, Shropshire, England, d. 1901, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England.]
Men usually see little of what is before their eyes unless they are trained to use them in a special manner.
(1867)
Frank Gohlke
[Photographer, b. 1942, Wichita Falls, Texas, lives in Southborough, Massachusetts.]
I see the experience of pictures as a kind of cycle, a kind of circular motion in which you’re in the world, then you enter the picture and you’re in a different world (it’s not the same as the one you live in, but recognizable as one you might live in). And then you’re returned to your world with an enlarged sense of its possibilities.
Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
...a very receptive state of mind... not unlike a sheet of film itself—seemingly inert, yet so sensitive that a fraction of a second’s exposure conceives a life in it.
Clarence John Laughlin
[Photographer, b. 1905, Lake Charles, Louisiana, d. 1985, New Orleans, Louisiana.]
You don’t go out to accidentally find something that’s going to make a good picture, but [instead you find it] in yourself, knowing already what you want to do... at least subconsciously if not consciously; you find the thing in so-called nature or so-called reality which corresponds to this preconceived, this pre-sensitized, concept, which is hidden somewhere in your imagination or your subconscious... You go out and find what you are prepared to see.
Abraham Maslow
[b. 1908, Brooklyn, New York, d. 1970, Menlo Park, California.]
In a word, to perceive an object abstractly means not to perceive some aspects of it. It clearly implies selection of some attributes, rejection of other attributes, creation or distortion of still others. We make of it what we wish. We create it.
Dawoud Bey
[Photographer, b. 1953, Queens, New York, lives in Chicago.]
Improvisational things about picture-making... learned from working with the small camera early on have served me well in being able to think quickly when making [portraits].
