INTERVIEW: Henri Cartier-Bresson – "Famous Photographers Tell How”

"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."

http://www.americansuburbx.com/2012/01/interview-henri-cartier-bresson-famous.html

INTERVIEW: Robert Frank – “If An Artist Doesn’t Take Risks, Then It’s Not Worth It.”

You don’t have to ask very specific questions. If you want to talk about your life you have gone through, you can do it with writing or with photographs. Maybe you can do it. Some people cannot do it, whether with the one or the other. For me, I could do it with certain photographs and with some writing. If I had been a writer, I would have probably written a story or a book. Photography allows you in a relatively short time to say what you have to say and then go on with your life.

http://www.americansuburbx.com/2011/12/interview-robert-frank-if-an-artist-doesnt-take-risks-then-its-not-worth-it-2007.html

ORAL HISTORY:  Interview With Edward Hopper

It goes thus: My aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature. If this end is unattainable, so, it can be said, is perfection in any other ideal of painting or in any other of man's activities. The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting. One must perhaps qualify this statement and say that seemingly opposite tendencies each contain some modicum of the other. I have tried to present my sensations in what is the most congenial and impressive form possible to me. The technical obstacles of painting perhaps dictate this form. It derives also from the limitations of personality, and such may be the simplifications that I have attempted. I find in working always the disturbing intrusion of elements not a part of my most interested vision, and the inevitable obliteration and replacement of this vision by the work itself as it proceeds.

http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-edward-hopper-11844