20th-century Photographer Quotes

It would be mistaken to suppose that any of the best photography is come at by intellection; it is like all art, essentially the result of an intuitive process, drawing on all that the artist is rather than on anything he thinks, far less theorizes about.

Empty empty empty
so many empty chairs
everywhere. They look
charming in van Gogh's paintings.

Liu Xia (intellectual)

The desert... may serve better as the backdrop for the problematic relationship between man and the environment. The human struggle, the successes... both noble and foolish, are readily apparent in the desert. Symbols and relationships seem to arise that stand for the human condition itself.

Richard Misrach

In my work, the information is the least important part. It's there, and the work wouldn't mean the same thing without it, but it isn't structured around the information. The most interesting part to me is the visual play... looking at this little universe of representation that I can make out of the world.

The older I get, the one thing I can trust in myself more than anything else is the way I feel about something. When I photograph I try to be as aware of my feelings as I can be to somehow try and get them out of me and onto the film in terms of the way I am responding or seeing the world.

The principal thing is the question of how our culture views age: that old is ugly Just think of Rodin, how he dealt with people of all ages. I have the feeling that I'm alive, I have a body I can make it extremely interesting. That keeps me alive and vital. It's a kind of process of energizing myself by my belief that the classical tradition of art that we've inherited from the Greeks is a load of bullshit.

Where you point the camera is the question and the picture you get is the answer to decipher.

Robert Polidori

We are Africans not because we are born in Africa, but because Africa is born in us.

Chester Higgins, Jr.

I do not photograph for ulterior purposes. I photograph for the thing itself - for the photograph - without consideration of how it may be used.

Obsession and repetition in the process of making things is one constant element in my work.

Emotion may be expressed, or the utter lack of it may be expressed, but the only important fact is that of expression.

William Mortensen

Black people have been killed for directing their gaze at the wrong person. I want my subjects to reclaim their right to look, to see, to be seen.

Children are the true believers, and some of us are lucky enough to make the transition to adulthoood without ever losing the ability to see through young eyes.

To photograph is often compared to an act of redemption - to select from an infinite number of choices that which is to be remembered.

My sympathies have always been with the everyday people... the center of my photography.

Jerome Liebling

The printed page seems to have come to something of a dead end for all of us.

We cannot hope to control what we do not understand, nor to confront our adversary, war, with our eyes averted.

Infinitesimal is the nearest to zero infinitesimal is so small that it is no longer something but it is not yet nothing.

I cannot solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art.

I think one of the shortcomings of reality, of real experience, is most people's inability to examine something carefully and thoughtfully without moving around or being distracted by something else. What photography does really is it forces you to examine something you normally wouldn't.

Stories are one of the greatest gifts we can give to our children. Stories are equipment for life.

Matthew Knisely

Affection is the mortal illness of lonely people.

Is it not the artist who - like our dreams - dissolves the pretenses that hide us from ourselves, disclosing both our self-serving fantasies and our unsuspected potentialities?

Working myself into a position of total versatility, so that I can do anything I want to do at the time I want to do it. Whether I do it or not is another question.

Toys are intriguing, and I want to see what I can do with them. On a deeper level, they represent one way that society socializes its young

David Levinthal