Photographers From The United States

"I'm a different person. I don't want to be titled as Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain's daughter. I want to be thought of as Frances Cobain."

"She tells me to "live free and be free, but listen to other people's advice." I listen, but I don't always follow it."

"My favorite color is light pink. I also like baby blue because it brings out my eyes."

"New York is like my dream city. That's where I'm going to live, I'm convinced of it."

"Mom and I…we're both very flaky people."

"I get it, I really do, but at the same time, it's creepy. It's creepy to see fan sites about me."

"These people are fascinated by me, but I haven't done anything. I'm famous by default. I came out of the womb and people wanted to know who I was because of my parents. If you're a big Nirvana fan, a big Hole fan, then I understand why you would want to get to know me, but I'm not my parents. People need to wait until I've done something valid with my life."

"I have the attention span of a rabbit on cocaine."

"I can count on one hand how many people I trust."

"I want to be sublimely happy."

"I don't like to look sloppy. I'm a girlie-girl."

"While I'm generally silent on the affairs of my biological mother, her recent tirade has taken a gross turn. I have never been approached by Dave Grohl in more than a platonic way. I'm in a monogamous relationship and very happy. Twitter should ban my mother."

"Kurt got to the point where he eventually had to sacrifice every bit of who he was to his art, because the world demanded it of him," Frances says bluntly at one point. "I think that was one of the main triggers as to why he felt he didn't want to be here and everyone would be happier without him."But "in reality, if he had lived," she goes on, "I would have had a dad. And that would have been an incredible experience."

"It paints a portrait of a man attempting to cope with being a human."

"Even though Kurt died in the most horrific way possible, there is this mythology and romanticism that surrounds him, because he's 27 forever. The shelf life of an artist or musician isn't particularly long. Kurt has gotten to icon status because he will never age. He will always be that relevant in that time and always be beautiful."

"There is, with any great artist, a little manic-ness and insanity."

"My dad was exceptionally ambitious. But he had a lot thrown on him, exceeding his ambition. He wanted his band to be successful. But he didn't want to be the fucking voice of a generation."

"I don't really like Nirvana that much. [grins] Sorry, promotional people, Universal. I'm more into Mercury Rev, Oasis, Brian Jonestown Massacre. [laughs] The grunge scene is not what I'm interested in. But "Territorial Pissings" is a fucking great song. And "Dumb"—I cry every time I hear that song. It's a stripped-down version of Kurt's perception of himself—of himself on drugs, off drugs, feeling inadequate to be titled the voice of a generation."

"No. I would have felt more awkward if I'd been a fan. I was around 15 when I realized he was inescapable. Even if I was in a car and had the radio on, there's my dad. He's larger than life and our culture is obsessed with dead musicians. We love to put them on a pedestal. If Kurt had just been another guy who abandoned his family in the most awful way possible… But he wasn't. He inspired people to put him on a pedestal, to become St. Kurt."

"They [Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic, and Pat Smear] look at me, and you can see they're looking at a ghost. … Dave said, "She is so much like Kurt." They were all talking amongst themselves, rehashing old stories I'd heard a million times. I was sitting in a chair, chain-smoking, looking down like this. [acts bored] And they went, "You are doing exactly what your father would have done.""

"The hardest part of doing anything creatively is just getting up and doing. Once I get out of bed and get into my art room, I start painting. I'm there. And I'm doing it."

"We're each other's everything."

"I love strong, opinionated, intelligent women."

"I must admit that I am not a member of the ugly school. I have a great regard for certain notions of beauty even though to some it is an old fashioned idea. Some photographers think that by taking pictures of human misery, they are addressing a serious problem. I do not think that misery is more profound than happiness."

"Leiter’s sensibility . . . placed him outside the visceral confrontations with urban anxiety associated with photographers such as Robert Frank or William Klein. Instead, for him the camera provided an alternate way of seeing, of framing events and interpreting reality. He sought out moments of quiet humanity in the Manhattan maelstrom, forging a unique urban pastoral from the most unlikely of circumstances."

"I am not immersed in self-admiration. When I am listening to Vivaldi or Japanese music or making spaghetti at three in the morning and realize that I don’t have the proper sauce for it, fame is of no use. The other way to put it is that I don’t have a talent for narcissism. Or, to put it yet another way, the mirror is not my best friend."

"I didn’t try to communicate any kind of philosophy since I am not a philosopher. I am a photographer. That’s it."

"I don’t need to belittle the work of present day photography. I see quite often things that I like and admire. I do digital photography myself. Certain people of my generation decided that the past was better than the present. I am not sure that that is true. I don’t want to be one of those people that says the world has come to an end."

"I don’t plan things. As a rule I prefer to see what happens."

"I didn’t photograph people as an example of New York urban something or other. I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera. I look into the camera and take pictures. My photographs are the tiniest part of what I see that could be photographed. They are fragments of endless possibilities."

"I never thought of the urban environment as isolating. I leave these speculations to others. It’s quite possible that my work represents a search for beauty in the most prosaic and ordinary places. One doesn’t have to be in some faraway dreamland in order to find beauty. I realize that the search for beauty is not highly popular these days. Agony, misery and wretchedness, now these are worth perusing."

"I never felt the need to do what everyone else did. And I wasn’t troubled by the fact that other people were doing other things."

"I really don’t think I was influenced by anyone. I think I will leave it up to someone else to determine who influenced me. I admired a tremendous number of photographers, but for some reason I arrived at a point of view of my own."

"In order to build a career and to be successful, one has to be determined. One has to be ambitious. I much prefer to drink coffee, listen to music and to paint when I feel like it."

"Today, I am no longer concerned with photography as an art form. I believe it is potentially the best medium for explaining man to himself and his fellow man."

": "Thoroughly Modern Steichen", senior curatorial assistant of "Edward Steichen in the 1920s and 1930s: A Recent Acquisition" exhibition, Carrie Springer, Interview, Hannah Ghorashi, 12/5/13."

"He used lighting to create these kind of abstract environments for his subjects—in our show, there's a portrait of Maurice Chevalier dancing while holding his hat, but the shadows of him and his arm look like they're almost dancing in these abstract forms. The focus is very much on him and his face, yet it's all constructed in a very modernist environment."

"Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. [It is] a major force in explaining man to man."

"When you say journalist, it's like oh -- how many sources have you fact checked? When you say photographer -- it's, why are your photos a little bit out of focus? The answer is because I don't care. I like to call myself a storyteller so I don't have to worry about other people's definition of what correct work is."

"The fact that people are so willing to disclose (deeply personal issues in their lives) shows you how much we avoid talking about these very serious issues in our everyday lives,"

"New York is a giant place and no matter how big you get, there's still going to be a ton of people who haven't heard of you."

"The Saturday arguments about photography as a machine art are answered by the best photographers. "If the camera were a machine!" Berenice Abbott said, "with the precision and the flexibility, the accommodation and power of machines as we know them today!" And "Our lighting has not been begun," she said. "We need a light as good as sunlight-better than sunlight.""

"People say they have to express their emotions. I’m sick of that. Photography doesn’t teach you how to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see."

"Suppose we took a thousand negatives and made a gigantic montage: a myriad-faceted picture containing the elegances, the squalor, the curiosities, the monuments, the sad faces, the triumphant faces, the power, the irony, the strength, the decay, the past, the present, the future of a city – that would be my favorite picture."

"I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time. Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism—real life—the now."

"The Baroness was like Jesus Christ and Shakespeare all rolled into one and perhaps she was the most influential person to me in the early part of my life."

"I wanted to photograph this subject because the signs’ shrieking blatancy literally cried out for a visual record. To my mind the faded, yellowing paper and the red paint were not particularly paint,able. In black and white the signs shouted, clamored for attention, in visual anarchy. At the same time, the shrewd business sense which plastered them solid over the entire window area produced, as it were by chance, an esthetic by-product: the whole has homogeneity and variety of texture, simultaneously, which give the picture interest."

"Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself."

"A photographer's best work is, alas, generally done for himself."

"A lady is a woman who makes a man behave like a gentleman."