Janet Malcolm
[Writer, b. 1934, Prague, Czechoslovakia, lives in New York.]
The heavy odds against finding the desired… work of art in the mess and flux of life, as opposed to the serene orderliness of imagined reality, give a special tense dazzle and an atmosphere of tour de force to any photographs that succeed in the search.
Boris Mikhailov
[Photographer, b. 1938, Kharkov, Ukraine, lives in Kharkov and Berlin.]
When you’re open to life, it responds to you. That is what an intuitive possibility of photography is—to crawl deeper into the depths of life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
[Writer and thinker, b. 1803, Boston, Massachusetts, d. 1882, Concord, Massachusetts.]
We live among surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them.
Tina Modotti
[Photographer and political activist, b. 1896, Undine, Italy, d. 1942, Mexico City.]
I cannot, as you [Edward Weston] once proposed to me—“solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art”... in my case, life is always struggling to predominate and art naturally suffers.
Weegee (Usher Fellig)
[Photographer, b. 1899, Zlothew near Lemberg, Austrian Galicia (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), d. 1968, New York.]
To me a photograph is a page from life, and that being the case, it must be real.
Sylvia Plachy
[Photographer, b. 1943, Budapest, Hungary, lives in New York.]
Every photo is almost a fiction or a dream. If it’s really good, it’s another form of life.
Lev Manovich
[Artist, theorist, and critic, b. 1960, Moscow, lives in New York.]
We turn our own lives into an information archive by storing all our emails, SMS, digital photos, and other “digital traces” of our existence.
Harry Callahan
[Photographer, b. 1912, Detroit, Michigan, d. 1999, Atlanta, Georgia.]
I think what photography can do really well is allow you to make a life’s work… So theoretically—the series is first, then the group is next, and the whole life’s work is the grand finale.
(1979)
