Giséle Freund
[Photographer, b. 1908, Berlin, Germany, d. 2000, Paris, France.]
The lens, that allegedly impartial eye, permits all possible distortions of reality... The importance of photography lies not only in the fact that it is a creation, but above all in the fact that it is one of the most effective means of shaping our ideas and influencing our behavior.
Walter Benjamin
[Philosopher, critic, and theorist, b. 1892, Berlin, d. 1940, Port Bou, France.]
For it is another nature that speaks to the camera than to the eye: other in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious.
A.D. Coleman
[Critic and writer, b. 1943, New York, lives in New York.]
It is no coincidence that one cardinal rule in brainwashing is to remove from the victim all photographs of himself and people he has known.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau
[Writer and theorist, b. 1947, New York, lives in Santa Barbara, California.]
Art photography, although long since legitimized by all the conventional discourses of fine art, seems destined perpetually to recapitulate all the rituals of the
arriviste. Inasmuch as one of those rituals consists of the establishment of suitable ancestry, a search for distinguished bloodlines, it inevitably happens that photographic history and criticism are more concern with notions of tradition and continuity than with those of rupture and change.
Sergei Tretyakov
[Writer, critic, and artist, b. 1892, Guldiga, Russia (now Kuldigas, Latvia), d. 1939, Moscow.]
If a more or less random snapshot is like an infinitely fine scale that has been scratched from the surface of reality with the tip of a finger, then in comparison the photoseries or photomontage lets us experience the extended massiveness of reality, its authentic meaning. We build systematically. We must also photograph systematically. Sequence and long-term photographic observation—that is the method.
Pierre Bourdieu
[Sociologist, b. 1930, Denguin, France, d. 2002, Paris.]
Photography itself is most frequently nothing but the reproduction of the image that a group produces of its own integration.
Rineke Dijkstra
[Photographer, b. 1959, Sittard, The Netherlands, lives in Amsterdam.]
I am looking for a kind of purity, something essential from human beings... I believe in a sort of magic.
Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
A sequence of photographs is like a cinema of stills. The time and space between photographs is filled by the beholder, first of all from himself, then from what he can read in the implications of design, the suggestions springing from treatment, and any symbolism that might grow from within the subject itself.
