Diane Arbus

I work from awkwardness, by that I mean I don’t like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.

Ariella Azoulay

In photography - and this is evident in every single photo - there is something that extends beyond the photographer's action, and no photographer, even the most gifted, can claim ownership of what appears in the photograph. Every photograph of others bears the traces of the meeting between the photographed persons and the photographer, neither of whom can, on their own, determine how this meeting will be inscribed in the resulting image. The photograph exceeds any presumption of ownership or monopoly and any attempt at being exhaustive. 

Kiku Adatto

We have more opportunities to live at the surface, continually posing, to see and measure ourselves by the images we make and the images others make of us.

Émile Zola

A mon avis, vous ne pouvez pas dire que vous avez vu quelque chose à fond si vous n'en avez pas pris une photograpie révélant un tas de détails qui, autrement, ne pourraient même pas être discernés.

Susan Sontag

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

Susan Sontag

We learn to see ourselves photographically, to regard oneself as attractive is, precisely, to judge that one would look good in a photograph.

Gerhard Richter

The similarity with the model in one of my pictures is not merely only apparent and unintentional, it is also completely useless.

Robert Park

In so  far as this mask represents the conception we have formed of ourselves - the role we are striving to live up to - this mask is our truer self, the self we would like to be.

Alex Katz

I figure if I get the surface right everything will be there.

Richard Avedon

There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

Milan Kundera

The serial number of a human speciemn is the face, that accidental und unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither the character nor the soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen. 

karl heinz stockhausen

the biggest work of art there has ever been. The fact that spirits achieve with one act something which we in music could never dream of, that people practice ten years madly, fanatically for a concert. And then die. [Hesitantly.] And that is the greatest work of art that exists for the whole Cosmos. Just imagine what happened there. There are people who are so concentrated on this single performance, and then five thousand people are driven to Resurrection. In one moment.

Victor I. Stoichita

For the simulacrum to triumph, the model must die.

theodor adorno

The beautiful in nature is history standing still and refusing to unfold.