“The trouble with photography is that it’s been hijacked by the art world.” … Don McCullin in the New York Times
“I’m a photographer, that’s all. Like anything else, not all paintings are art. Not all photographs are art. They might be, but it’s not up to me to say.” … Josef Koudelka in The Getty Iris
“Works of art, by being publicly exhibited and offered for sale, are becoming articles of trade, following the unreasoning laws of markets and fashion” … Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, consort of Queen Victoria in a speech to the Royal Academy 1851
“The camera cannot lie, but it can be an accessory to untruth.” … Harold Evans author of Pictures on a Page.
“It is difficult to conceive of democracies surviving without credible witnesses.” … Fred Ritchin, author of After Photography.
“The presence of facts does not mean the truth is present.” … David M. Shribman
“Photography should register and give us documents.” … Henri Matisse
“Look, I’m not an intellectual – I just take pictures.” … Helmut Newton
“Few see, most don’t even bother to look.” … Fred Herzog
“It takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary.“ … David Bailey
“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” … Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Ms. Horn always had a lot to say about her work … some of it is quite interesting, but artists don’t own the meaning of their artworks.” … from a review by Roberta Smith in the New York Times.
“the most ‘successful’ artists of the 21st century, flogging their endless versions of the same idea to know-nothing billionaires.” … Julian Barnes in his book “Keeping an Eye Open”
“Artists pretend to make art, critics pretend to like it.” … Martin Toren attempting to explain post modernism
“You want me to say it worse?” … Robert Frost on being asked to explain one of his poems.
“A lot of what passes for ‘visual literacy’ today is merely visual cynicism…” … Susie Linfield author of “The Cruel Radiance”
“Galleries don’t exhibit work based on artistic merit. Galleries exhibit work they think they can sell.” … Joerg Colberg
“Curator’s art is indisputably, even innocuously, elegant, with clear roots in minimal and conceptual art and not much else. It tends to be profusely appreciated by a hermetic few, curators, artists and theorists, who fetishize its refinements and often take its creators pretty much at their word.” … Edward Winkleman, blogspot
“There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.” … Ansel Adams
“I don’t want to hear them talk about their work …They make the [stuff] and I talk about it … [Artists] are the last people who know what they’re doing. It’s left brain, right brain: the part of the mind that produces analysis and explanation is turned off in the studio; ask an artist about what the art is and you’re talking to somebody who, in essence, wasn’t there. You’re just going to pick up some [baloney] they’ve heard from their dealer or some professor of art theory.” … Peter Schjeldahl, art critic for the New Yorker in an interview.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” … Marcel Proust
“Colour is watching the movie. Black and white is reading the book.” … John Denniston
“With the one eye that is closed, one looks within; with the other eye that is open, one looks without.” … Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” … Paul Gauguin
“One has to hurry, if one wants still to see something. Everything disappears.” … Paul Cezanne
“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place. … Elliott Erwitt
“Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.” … Berenice Abbott
“One photograph out of focus is a mistake … one hundred photographs out of focus is a style.” … Author unknown
“Hardening of the categories causes art disease.” … W. Eugene Smith in a note to himself found among his papers at CPP.