The Optical Box Chronicle

My botanical documents should contribute to restoring the link with nature. They should reawaken a sense of nature, point to its teeming richness of form, and prompt the viewer to observe for himself the surrounding plant world.

Karl Blossfeldt [Photographer, b. 1865, Schielo, Germany, d. 1932, Berlin.]

© Mitch Cullin

I often think of what I photograph as a soap opera, where I am waiting for the right cast to fall into place.

Martin Parr [Photographer, b. 1952, Epson, Surrey, England, lives in Bristol and London, England.]

© Mitch Cullin

Anybody will be able to observe how much more easily a painting, and above all sculpture or architecture can be grasped in photographs than in reality.

Walter Benjamin [Philosopher, critic, and theorist, b. 1892, Berlin, d. 1940, Port Bou, France.]

© Mitch Cullin

We face the prospect of being reduced to the status of consumers who, given a hyper-abundance of choices, lack the ability to choose. Those in power benefit from this abandonment of discernment; they get to make the choices for us. Thus the liberty of an unchecked image environment may prove to be less a blessing than a subtle form of tyranny, and the democracy of the camera a perverse kind of fascism.

Andy Grundberg [Critic, curator, and educator, lives in Washington, D.C.]

© Mitch Cullin

I can’t photograph the past. I can only photograph what happens in the moment I encounter this particular object, my most personal reactions, what I feel and see.

Ishiuchi Miyako [Photographer, b. 1947, Gunma Prefecture, Japan, lives in Tokyo.]

© Mitch Cullin

We are drawn to photographs on museum walls, and to those in family albums as well. In just such a way (we think to ourselves), in sunlight indistinguishable from that of tomorrow afternoon, this woman, this child, this Indian chief posed; bodies now forever dissolved were in a certain instant bombarded by photons, were inarguably there.

John Updike [Writer, b. 1932, Shillington, Pennsylvania, d. 2009, Boston, Massachusetts.]

© Mitch Cullin

If an artist does not have an erotic involvement with everything that he sees, he may as well give up. To be a human being may be a very messy thing, but to be an artist is something else entirely, because art is religion, art is sex, art is society. Art is everything.

Lucas Samaras [Artist, b. 1936, Kastoria, Greece, lives in New York.]

© Mitch Cullin

I did not start out as a photographer but, instead, as a writer. Whether for good or ill, this fact has inspired and colored many of my concepts. Through photography I have also tried to tie together and further my active interests in painting, in poetry, in psychology, and in architecture. Whatever value my photography has, it is only because of these other interests.

Clarence John Laughlin [Photographer, b. 1905, Lake Charles, Louisiana, d. 1985, New Orleans, Louisiana.]

© Mitch Cullin

One reason I was interested in photography was to get away from the preciousness of the art object.

Cindy Sherman [Artist, b. 1954, Glen Ridge, New Jersey, lives in New York.]

© Mitch Cullin

It is light that reveals, light that obscures, light that communicates. It is light I “listen” to. The light late in the day has a distinct quality, as it fades toward the darkness of evening. After sunset there is a gentle leaving of the light, the air begins to still, and a quiet descends. I see magic in the quiet light of dusk. I feel quiet, yet intense energy in the natural elements of our habitat. A sense of magic prevails. A sense of mystery. It is a time for contemplation, for listening— a time for making photographs.

John Sexton [Photographer, b. 1953, Maywood, California, lives in California.]

© Mitch Cullin

Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings. Then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines.

Margaret Atwood [Writer, b. 1939, Ottawa, Canada, lives in Toronto.]

© Mitch Cullin

I came to Los Angeles for two reasons: The first was a photo by Julius Shulman of Case Study House #21, and the other was the Atheletic Model Guildʼs Physique Pictorial.

David Hockney [Artist, b. 1937, Bradford, England, lives in Bridlington, Yorkshire; London; and Los Angeles.]

© Mitch Cullin

I don’t care about fashion at all. And I know it’s kind of a dodgy thing to be a fashion photographer, a kind of pathetic occupation, but I like it, even though I question it.

Juergen Teller [Photographer, b. 1964, Erlangen, Germany, lives in London.]

© Mitch Cullin