Brassaï (Gyula Halász)
[Photographer, b. 1889, Brassó, Transylvania, Hungary (now Romania), d. 1984, Eze, Alpes-Maritimes, France.]
... drawn by the beauty of evil, the magic of the lower depths, having taken pictures for my “voyage to the end of the night” from the outside, I wanted to know what went on inside: behind the walls, behind the facades, in the wings: bars, dives, night clubs, one-night hotels, bordellos, opium dens. I was eager to penetrate this other world, this fringe world, the secret, sinister world of mobsters, outcasts, toughs, pimps, whores, addicts, inverts.
Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
When you grow up your mother says, “Wear rubbers or you’ll catch cold.” When you become an adult you discover that you have the right not to wear rubbers and to see if you catch cold or not. It’s something like that.
Douglas Coupland
[Writer, b. 1961, Baden-Söllingen, Germany, lives in Vancouver, Canada.]
When you see such photos, you can’t help but wonder at just how sweet and sad and innocent all moments of life are rendered by the tripping of a camera’s shutter, for at that point the future is still unknown and has yet to hurt us, and also for that brief moment, our poses are accepted as honest.
Michael Lesy
[Writer and artist, b. 1945, Shaker Heights, Ohio, lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.]
For years and years and years… people showed me pictures that had been left unclaimed at big photo-finishers. Sometimes I think it changed my personality, sometimes I wonder if it didn’t damage my brain.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
The photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes surprising when we do not know why it has been taken.
Donald McCullin
[Photographer, b. 1935, Finsbury Park, London, lives in Somerset, England.]
The camera was a key to open up my life. It was like opening a huge window to the world. It gave me education, it gave me hope, it gave me travel, and in the end, after giving me all those things, it started taking things away from me. It took my mind away from me, it took things back from me. You don’t own those things in the beginning. You don’t own yourself in the beginning, you’re just dumped on this earth and you have to stand up and try to walk and try to get through it.
Larry Clark
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1943, Tulsa, Oklahoma, lives in New York.]
Once the needle goes in, it never comes out.
Larry Burrows
[Photographer, b. 1926, London, d. 1971, Laos.]
Do I have the right to carry on working and leave a man suffering? To my mind, the answer is no, you have got to help him... You cannot go through these elements without, obviously feeling something yourself—you cannot be mercenary in this way because it will make you less of a photographer...
