Steve Edwards
[Writer and photohistorian, lives in London.]
The implications of postmodern for photography are immense, most obviously if, pace Saussure, meaning is constructed internal to the frame: then photography becomes exactly like any other form of art. Having excised reference the photograph is reduced to a painting with light.
Thomas Ruff
[Photographer, b. 1958, Zell, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf, Germany.]
Of course there are many photographers who deliberately try to give the image a personal signature... That’s of no interest to me whatsoever. I’m just interested in the images that emerge.
Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
In a world of images… nothing stands still or gets heavy—the world is leaping bursting dancing splattering shattering well-used and tireless.
Walter Benjamin
[Philosopher, critic, and theorist, b. 1892, Berlin, d. 1940, Port Bou, France.]
Rather than ask, “What is the
attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time?” I should like to ask, “What is its
position in them.”
Leon Golub
[Artist, b. 1922, Chicago, Illinois, d. 2004, New York.]
The freeze of a photographic gesture, the fix of an action, how an arm twists, how a smile gets momentarily stabilized or exaggerated—to try to get some of this is important... The photofix inflects the almost literal shaping of a figure, changes of movement or potential movement, and a sense of occurrence or event.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Reality has always been interpreted through the reports given by images. Our irrepressible feeling that the photographic process is something magical has genuine basis. No one takes an easel painting to be in any sense co-substantial with its subject; it only represents or refers. But a photograph is not only like its subject, a homage to the subject. It is part of, and extension of that subject; and a potent means of acquiring it, or gaining control over it.
Terry Richardson
[Photographer, b. 1965, New York, lives in New York.]
To me, my best pictures happen when I capture the spirit of Black Flag’s
Nervous Breakdown EP.
Margaret Bourke-White
[Photographer, b. 1904, New York, d. 1971, Darien, Connecticut.]
The sights I have just seen [at Buchenwald] are so unbelievable that I don’t think I’ll believe them myself until I’ve seen the photographs...
