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.”
Olivo Barbieri
[Photographer, b. 1954, Carpi, Italy, lives in Milan.]
I am no longer interested in seeing and knowing everything all at once in my work. Technically I select the area of focus and if it’s possible I try to make an amalgamation of every shape and color in the picture so that it acquires a circular movement: from representation to abstraction, from life to death, and vice-versa.
Gerhard Richter
[Artist, b. 1932, Dresden, lives in Düsseldorf.]
I do not mean to attack anything at all. The most seemingly banal pictures are on the contrary the richest... A snapshot, when one conforms to it, becomes an extremely powerful factor... the family photo, with everyone well portrayed in the center of the image, is literally overflowing with life.
Brigitte Bardot
[Actress, b. 1934, Paris, lives in Saint Tropez, France.]
A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you.
Josef Koudelka
[Photographer, b. 1938, Biskovice, Moravia, Czechoslovakia, lives in Paris.]
My work has no theme. I don’t care if my photographs get published, and I have no interest in “the news.” But the invasion of Prague was not news, it was my life.
Robert Frank
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1924, Zürich, Switzerland, lives in Mabou, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, and New York.]
I think I always had a cold eye. I always saw things realistically. But, it’s also easier to show the darkness than the joy of life. Life is not beautiful all the time. Life can be good, then you lie down, and stare up at the ceiling, and the sadness falls on you. Things move on, time passes, people go away, and sometimes they don’t come back.
Matthew Brady
[Photographer, b. 1823, Warren County, New York, d. 1896, New York.]
No one will ever know what I went through to secure those negatives. The world can never appreciate it. It changed the whole course of my life.
(Written at the end of his life, penniless and bitter.)
Werner Bischof
[Photographer, b. 1916, Zürich, Switzerland, d. 1954, Peña de Aguila, Peru.]
I believe it is one of our biggest tasks—the task of our life—to do everything possible to counter poverty and to build a freedom-loving future.
