Andreas Gursky
[Photographer, b. 1955, Leipzig, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf.]
We are alone on this planet. It’s not a choice. Here we are. This is what everyone has to deal with.
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.
Christian Boltanski
[Artist, b. 1944, Paris, lives in Paris.]
Everyone recognizes themselves in the photo album.
André Malraux
[Writer, critic, and politician, b. 1901, Paris, d. 1975, Paris.]
The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.
Wynn Bullock
[Photographer, b. 1902, Chicago, Illinois, d. 1975, Monterey, California.]
At their best, photographs as symbols not only serve to help illuminate some of the darkness of the unknown, they also serve to lessen the fears that too often accompany the journeys from the known to the unknown.
Mario Giacomelli
[Photographer, b. 1925, Senigallia, Italy, d. 2000, Senigallia.]
[My mother] died a few months ago, and when she was dead I kissed her lips. For me it was a beautiful moment. From then on I started living with her, asking her from time to time if she was alright, if she was pleased with me. But these things are far greater than photography, and I probably shouldn’t be speaking about them.
John Tagg
[Writer, theorist, and photohistorian, b. 1949, North Shields, England, lives in Ithica, New York.]
[“Documentary” photography’s] unlikely and paradoxical mixture of social and psychological “truths,” exotic voyeurism, fetishised artistic subjectivity, and formalist claims to universality, which may once have appeared mutually enhancing, was contradictory and inherently unstable.
Eddie Adams
[Photojournalist, b. 1933, New Kensington, Pennsylvania, d. 2004, New York.]
How do you know you wouldn’t have pulled the trigger yourself?
(On his 1968 photograph of the summary street corner execution of prisoner Nguyen Van Lem by South Vietnam's police chief, Lt. Col. Nguyen Ngoc Loan.)
