"At the same time, Weegee's humor has a distinctly Gotham aspect to it. How else, his images say to us over and over, could these New Yorkers get through their day but with laughter? It was basic equipment for survival, a reflex of life itself."

"With his garish images, David LaChapelle holds a mirror up to a hedonistic, lust-oriented and affluent society. They are contemporary, ironic and sometimes provocative images from the machine of dreams and desires that is the USA, filled with well-known pop musicians, actors, athletes and models of the most varying of colours."

"All strong Arbus photographs are richly ambiguous from the start, and if anything, they grow even more complex as bits of her story adhere to them. Her suicide and her separation from her husband are part of it, along with her attraction to what she called danger and excitement."

"I don’t presume that everything I do is fine. But, I am showing a slice of life in New York City that in several years won’t be there any longer. Many of the people that I photograph are people who have a certain individuality in the way they walk, the way they dress, the way they look."

"This is the ultimate market exchange, the sale, for a few kopeks, of these peoples’ only resource, their bodies. Like all capitalists and entrepreneurs they sell what they have for the best offer, in this case to a photographer who takes their pictures, which will then be consumed by the international art world."

"We get a rock an go ta my place I can give ya whatever ya want, all night long."

"There is no question that what Goldin offers encompasses a religious dimension. The aesthetic that suffuses many, if not most, of her best-known images is blatantly Catholic in both atmosphere and iconography."

"All told, I have been to eight houses where Meatyard once lived, or, if they are no longer there, to the lots where they once stood. Once I found myself standing on a dark, suburban street six hours from home, looking for a house that I could not, and never did, find."

"Yes, I think education and intelligence is important, but not art. Not artistic education, because when you take a photograph you may be very influenced by what you have seen in paintings and this happened to me often."

"In his construction of a new reality, Gursky does not hesitate, finally, to remove unwanted elements from his photos. In his 'Rhein II' (1999) every trace of industrialisation is eliminated, so that it seems as if a virgin river streams through unspoilt nature, and in 'Stockholm public library' (1999) the floor and an elevator are omitted."

"Photography is in a way a mental process. We have to know what to, be clear, on what we want to say. Our conceptions, our, what we think of a certain situation, a certain problem. Photography is a way of writing it, of drawing, making sketches of it."

"William Klein is an American photographer. One is tempted to say that he is the American photographer; among his coevals, only Richard Avedon can match him for stamina and range, and for a visual instinct so sure that you wonder whether both men had cameras implanted in their heads at birth."

"I don't think the essence of photography has the hand in it so much. The essence is done very quietly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine. I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking."

"It’s quite true that what I am aiming at, even when I take portraits, is to get a scandalous picture. I would love to be a paparazzo."

"I was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in January 1943. When I was 16 I started shooting valo. Valo was a nasel inhaler you could buy at the drugstore for a dollar with a tremendous amount of amphetamine in it."

"He opens the camera’s shutter for several minutes and occasionally lights up a cigarette while the desolate isolation and deep insecurities of the single family home
leak through towards permanence on film."

"Tony Stamolis‘ tour de armpit of California Fresno force is righteous-mad-style white trash migrant worker livin’ blues baby… a photographic onslaught of ugly dirty beauty… a freakin’ camera full of fugly-poppin’ pill-mushroom-love."

"We would go right inside the houses where the crime had occurred, on the street, in the factory, in a ditch, or wherever, and I would take pictures of all those dead people."

"Brandt did not go to great lengths to turn people into icons, nor did he presume to show their "true nature" in something so transient as a photograph."

"There's always an implied timeline to a narrative, and since that is not a chronological timeline in this, it's not a survey either, but the timeline does have something to do with my consideration of the individual images, in some ways."

"When you grow up in the streets of NY you grow up hard, it gives you the background to understand that lifestyle. That lifestyle I understood, the drug game I knew very well."

"Yes, an inversion taking place as elements and features, constructed from "normal ones", are twisted into creatures."

"Does the man serve as a symbol for the work or does the work serve as a symbol for the man?"

"Such was the spontaneity and intuitive quality of this kind of work that we might term it ‘stream-of-consciousness’ photography, the visual equivalent of the stream-of-consciousness writing of the 1950s American ‘Beat’ writers such as Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg."

"The animal is subjected to one or two months of training. It must learn to live alongside other animals and humans, and to engage in different kinds of play without becoming violent."

"One thing I always try to do, if possible, is never to speak mildly or softly. I don’t think any photographer should. You should speak loud and clear. And that’s the way I try to take my pictures."

"Bellocq often wore a flamboyant red neckerchief or scarf in the old days, and he also owned many pieces of monogrammed jewelry. Perhaps Bellocq fancied himself as a bit of a Storyville dandy."