Gerhard Richter
[Artist, b. 1932, Dresden, lives in Düsseldorf.]
The photograph is the only picture that can truly convey information, even if it is technically faulty and the object can barely be identified. A painting of a murder is of no interest whatever; but a photograph of a murder fascinates everyone.
Luigi Ghirri
[Photographer, b. 1943, Scandiano, Italy, d. 1992, Reggio Emilia, Italy.]
Reality is being transformed into a colossal photograph, and the montage already exists: it’s called the real world.
Michael Light
[Photographer, b. 1963, Florida, lives in San Francisco.]
Even in this age of digital manipulation, photographs continue to hold a huge degree of power and meaning. They’re beautiful and sad and complicated because every stoppage of time refers to the motion of time.
Margaret Mead
[Anthropologist, b. 1901, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1978, New York.]
Photographs [are] of course heavily dependent upon the culture, the disciplinary point of view and the idiosyncratic vision of the particular photographer-analyst.
John Berger
[Writer and critic, b. 1926, London, d. 2017, Paris.]
A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
Paul Theroux
[Writer, b. 1941, Medford, Massachusetts, lives in Cape Cod, Massachusetts and Haleiwa, Hawaii.]
“I’ve never seen Marilyn like that before,” a critic once said to me. “That’s not Marilyn,” I said. “It’s a picture.”
Joel-Peter Witkin
[Photographer, b. 1939, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.]
I wanted my photographs to be as powerful as the last thing a person sees or remembers before death.
Allan Sekula
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1951, Erie, Pennsylvania, d. 2013, Los Angeles.]
In a technological sense, the most significant feature of the photograph is its reproducibility; the status of photograph as “unique object” had an early demise with Talbot’s invention of a positive-negative process.
