Helmut Newton
[Photographer, b. 1920, Berlin, d. 2004, Los Angeles.]
Any photographer who says he’s not a voyeur is either stupid or a liar.
Thomas Demand
[Photographer, b. 1964, Munich, Germany, lives in Los Angeles.]
[With my photographs] you have a [single, forever fixed] moment and my particular angle of vision. My tyrannical condition, as it were, is that I prescribe your vision.
Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
Get Weston off your back, forget Arbus, Frank, Adams, White, don’t look at photographs. Kill the Buddha.
Weegee (Usher Fellig)
[Photographer, b. 1899, Zlothew near Lemberg, Austrian Galicia (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), d. 1968, New York.]
I had so many unsold murder pictures lying around my room... I felt as if I were renting out a wing of the City Morgue.
Peter Conrad
[Critic, b. 1948, Hobart, Tasmania, lives in Oxford, England.]
The camera is a killing chamber, which speeds up the time it claims to be conserving. Like coffins exhumed and prised open, the photographs put on show what we were and what we will be again.
Tom Wolfe
[Writer, b. 1930, Richmond, Virginia, d. 2018, New York.]
[Richard Avedon] began standing people up against white no-seam paper and lighting their faces so that every wen, hickey, zit, whitehead, blackhead, goober, acne-crater, beard follicle, nose hair, ear bristle, crow’s foot, wattle, mold, eye bag, and liver spot stood out like a tumor, and the poor grey souls looked like pustular ruins, sad, spent, demoralized. Ah, Lord, you never get out of this world alive! This was
serious work.
Louis Aragon
[Artist, poet, and writer, b. 1897, Neuilly, France, d. 1982, Paris.]
For each man there awaits... a particular image capable of annihilating the entire universe.
Gordon Parks
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1912, Fort Scott, Kansas, d. 2006, New York.]
You have a 45mm automatic pistol on your lap, and I have a 35mm camera on my lap, and my weapon is just as powerful as yours.
(To Black Panther militant Eldridge Cleaver)
