Yve Lomax
[Artist and theorist, b. 1952, Dorset, lives in London.]
If the photograph ceases to refer to the real world; if the photograph no longer points to that which we assumed is beyond the frame which photography snaps; if the outside of the frame ceases to be the photograph’s reference point, in what terms can we constitute to speak of representation?
Jean Baudrillard
[Writer and theorist, b. 1929, Reims, France, d. 2007, Paris.]
... the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials—worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs, a more ductile material than meaning... It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.
Larry Fink
[Photographer, b. 1941, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania.]
The pictures I take now and tomorrow and yesterday are about human events on a small order. I try to make them bigger, to make them into metaphors that might speak across the board.
Rosalind Krauss
[Writer, critic, and historian, b. 1941, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]
Surrealist photography does not admit of the natural, as opposed to the cultural or made. And so all of what it looks at is seen as if already, and always, constructed, through a strange transposition of this thing into a different register. We see the object by means of an act of displacement, defined through a gesture of substitution.
