—Edward Weston
I attempt, through much of my work, to animate all things—even so-called "inanimate" objects—with the spirit of man. I have come, by degrees, to realize that this extremely animistic projection rises, ultimately, from my profound fear and disquiet over the accelerating mechanization of man's life; and the resulting attempts to stamp out individuality in all the spheres of man's activity—this whole process being one of the dominant expressions of our military-industrial society.... The creative photographer sets free the human contents of objects; and imparts humanity to the inhuman world around him.
—Clarence John Laughlin
You can photograph anything now.
—Robert Frank
I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment. They become in a sense...symbolic of themselves. I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune teller—to find out how they are. So they're dependent on me. I have to engage them. Otherwise there's nothing to photograph. The concentration has to come from me and involve them. Sometimes the force of it grows so strong that sounds in the studio go unheard. Time stops. We share a brief, intense intimacy. But it's unearned. It has no past.. .no future. And when the sitting is over—when the picture is done—there's nothing left except the photograph...the photograph and a kind of embarrassment. They leave...and I don't know them. I've hardly heard what they've said. If I meet them a week later in a room somewhere, I expect they won't recognize me. Because I don't feel I was really there. At least the part of me that was...is now in the photograph. And the photographs have a reality for me that the people don't. It's through the photographs that I know them. Maybe it's in the nature of being a photographer. I'm never really implicated. I don't have to have any real knowledge. It's all a question of recognitions.
—Richard Avedon
The daguerreotype is not merely an instrument which serves to draw nature... [it] gives her the power to reproduce herself.
—Louis Daguerre (1838, from a notice circulated to attract investors)
The creations of man or nature never have more grandeur than in an Ansel Adams photograph, and his image can seize the viewer with more force than the natural object from which it was made. —advertisement for a book of photographs by Adams (1974)
This Polaroid SX-70 photograph is part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
The work is by Lucas Samaras, one of America's foremost artists. It is part of one of the world's most important collections. It was produced using the finest instant photographic system in the world, the Polaroid SX-70 Land camera. That same camera is owned by millions. A camera of extraordinary quality and versatility capable of exposures from 10.4 inches to infinity.... Samaras' work of art from the SX-70, a work of art in itself.
—advertisement (1977)
Most of my photographs are compassionate, gentle, and personal. They tend to let the viewer see himself. They tend not to preach. And they tend not to pose as art.
—Bruce Davidson
New forms in art are created by the canonization of peripheral forms.
—Viktor Shklovsky
...a new industry has arisen which contributes not a little to confirming stupidity in its faith and to ruining what might have remained of the divine in the French genius. The idolatrous crowd postulates an ideal worthy of itself and appropriate to its nature—that is perfectly understandable. As far as painting and sculpture are concerned, the current credo of the sophisticated public, above all in France...is this: "I believe in Nature, and I believe only in Nature (there are good reasons for that). I believe that Art is, and cannot be other than, the exact reproduction of Nature.... Thus an industry that could give us a result identical to Nature would be the absolute of art." A vengeful God has granted the wishes of this multitude. Daguerre was his Messiah. And now the public says to itself: "Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the idiots!), then photography and Art are the same thing." From that moment our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze at its trivial image on a scrap of metal.... Some democratic writer ought to have seen here a cheap method of disseminating a loathing for history and for painting among the people....
—Baudelaire
Life itself is not the reality. We are the ones who put life into stones and pebbles.
—Frederick Sommer
The young artist has recorded, stone by stone, the cathedrals of Strasbourg and Rheims in over a hundred different prints. Thanks to him we have climbed all the steeples...what we never could have discovered through our own eyes, he has seen for us.. .one might think the saintly artists of the Middle Ages had foreseen the daguerreotype in placing on high their statues and stone carvings where birds alone circling the spires could marvel at their detail and perfection.... The entire cathedral is reconstructed, layer on layer, in wonderful effects of sunlight, shadows, and rain. M. Le Secq, too, has built his monument.
—H. de Lacretelle, in La Lumiere, March 20, 1852
The need to bring things spatially and humanly "nearer" is almost an obsession today, as is the tendency to negate the unique or ephemeral quality of a given event by reproducing it photographically. There is an ever-growing compulsion to reproduce the object photographically, in close-up....
—Walter Benjamin
It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.
—Dorothea Lange
If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, "I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life." I mean people are going to say, "You're crazy." Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.
—Diane Arbus
...Suddenly a small boy dropped to the ground next to me. I realized then that the police were not firing warning shots. They were shooting into the crowd. More children fell.... I began taking pictures of the little boy who was dying next to me. Blood poured from his mouth and some children knelt next to him and tried to stop the flow of blood. Then some children shouted they were going to kill me.... I begged them to leave me alone. I said I was a reporter and was there to record what happened. A young girl hit me on the head with a rock. I was dazed, but still on my feet. Then they saw reason and some led me away. All the time helicopters circled overhead and there was the sound of shooting. It was like a dream. A dream I will never forget.
—from the account by Alf Khumalo, a black reporter on the Johannesburg Sunday Times, of the outbreak of riots in Soweto, South Africa, published in The Observer [London], Sunday, fune 20, 1976
Photography is the only "language" understood in all parts of the world, and bridging all nations and cultures, it links the family of man. Independent of political influence—where people are free—it reflects truthfully life and events, allows us to share in the hopes and despair of others, and illuminates political and social conditions. We become the eye-witnesses of the humanity and inhumanity of mankind...
—Helmut Gernsheim (Creative Photography [1962])
Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one's cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite.