Aaron Siskind
[Photographer, b. 1903, New York, d. 1991, Providence, Rhode Island.]
My idea of what a picture is: it’s there, it exists by itself, it’s clean, it’s economically stated, it’s pure, it has meaning.
Marcel Duchamp
[Artist, b. 1887, Blainville, France, d. 1968, Neilly-sur-Seine, France.]
Unless a picture shocks, it is nothing.
Lev Manovich
[Artist, theorist, and critic, b. 1960, Moscow, lives in New York.]
Once we came to accept the photographic image as reality, the way to its future simulation was open.
Shomei Tomatsu
[Photographer, b. 1930, Nagoya, Japan, d. 2012, Okinawa, Japan.]
A single photograph is a mere fragment of an experience and, simultaneously, the distillation of the entire body of one’s experience.
Richard Serra
[Artist, b. 1939, San Francisco, lives in New York and Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada.]
Most photographs take their cues from advertising, where the priority is high image content for an easy Gestalt reading.
Rosalind Krauss
[Writer, critic, and historian, b. 1941, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]
Every photograph is the result of a physical imprint transferred by light reflections onto a sensitive surface. The photograph is thus a type of icon, or visual likeness, which bears an indexical relationship to its object.
Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Photographs attract false beliefs the way flypaper attracts flies.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.
