Marcel Proust
[Writer, b. 1871, Auteuil, Paris, d. 1922, Paris.]
Pleasure in this respect is like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative, which we develop later, when we are back at home, and have once again found at our disposal that inner darkroom the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people.
Robert Doisneau
[Photographer, b. 1912, Gentilly, Val-de-Marne, France, d. 1994, Montrouge, France.]
I think of Paris as a kind of crazy-paving footpath, the sort that lets you cross a lawn by stepping from one paving stone to the next without ever touching the grass.
Edward Weston
[Photographer, b. 1886, Highland Park, Illinois, d. 1958, Wildcat Hill, California.]
The hour is late, the light is failing... there stands my camera focused, trained like a gun, commanding the shells not to move a hair’s breath. And death to anyone who jars out of place what I know shall be a very important negative.
(On making the photograph Chambered Nautilus,
1927)
Julio Cortázar
[Writer, b. 1914, Brussels, Belgium, d. 1984, Paris, France.]
...to be only the lens of my camera, something fixed, rigid, incapable of intervention.
Ishiuchi Miyako
[Photographer, b. 1947, Gunma Prefecture, Japan, lives in Tokyo.]
There’s always something about [my photographs] that’s cold. Maybe that’s because I never really wanted to become a photographer.
Oliviero Toscani
[Photography, b. 1942, Milan, Italy, lives in Casale Marittimo, Tuscany, Italy.]
Some people look at a picture for thirty seconds, some for years. It doesn’t really matter because a picture is like life. You take out of life as much as you are able to take out of life, just as you take out of a picture as much as you can take out of a picture.
William Claxton
[Photographer, b. 1927, Pasadena, California, d. 2008, Los Angeles.]
The international language of jazz and photography need no special education or sophistication to be enjoyed. All that I ask is that you listen with your eyes.
Roy Stryker
[Economist, photographer, and administrator, b. 1893, Great Bend, Kansas, d. 1975, Grand Junction, Colorado.]
I think the best way to put it is that newspictures are the noun and the verb; our kind of photography is the adjective and adverb. The newspicture is a single frame; ours, a subject viewed in series. The newspicture is dramatic, all subject and action. Ours shows what’s back of the action.
