Robert Doisneau
[Photographer, b. 1912, Gentilly, Val-de-Marne, France, d. 1994, Montrouge, France.]
I prefer my hesitations, my false paths, my stammering, to a preconceived idea.

Jean Paul Sartre
[Writer and philosopher, b. 1905, Paris, d. 1980, Paris.]
Photographs are not ideas. They give us ideas.

Ansel Adams
[Photographer, b. 1902, San Francisco, d. 1984, Carmel, California.]
There is nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept.

Ernst Haas
[Photographer, b. 1921, Vienna, Austria, d. 1986, New York City.]
I prefer to be noticed some day, first for my ideas and second for my good eye.

Henry James
[Writer, b. 1843, New York, d. 1916, Rye, England.]
Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better the problem is solved.

Henry Adams
[Writer and historian, b. 1838, Boston, Massachusetts, d. 1918, Washington, D.C..]
I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.

Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
Photography books often have titles like
The Photographer’s Eye or
The Vision of So and So or
Seeing Photographs—as if photographers didn’t have minds, only eyes.

Doug Aitken
[Artist, b. 1968, Redondo Beach, California, lives in Los Angeles.]
When you make work, the concept is the basis for it; all choices of aesthetics or mediums come later.
