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.”
Frederick Douglass
[Writer, orator, activist, b. 1818, Talbot County, Maryland, d. 1895, Washington, D.C..]
Poets, prophets and reformers are all picture makers—and this ability is the secret of their power and of their achievements.
Edmundo Desnoes
[Writer, b. 1930, Havana, Cuba, lives in New York.]
Images, the visual power of present-day capitalism, like the ritual constructions of ancient Egypt, are refined ways of inhibiting and crushing man.
William Burroughs
[Writer, b. 1914, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1997, Lawrence, Kansas.]
Cut word lines — Cut music lines — Smash the control images — Smash the control machine —
Gordon Parks
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1912, Fort Scott, Kansas, d. 2006, New York.]
You have a 45mm automatic pistol on your lap, and I have a 35mm camera on my lap, and my weapon is just as powerful as yours.
(To Black Panther militant Eldridge Cleaver)
John Tagg
[Writer, theorist, and photohistorian, b. 1949, North Shields, England, lives in Ithica, New York.]
The camera is never merely an instrument. Its technical limitations and the resultant distortions register as meaning; its representations are highly coded; and it wields a power that is never its own. It arrives on the scene vested with a particular authority; authority to arrest, picture and transform daily life.
Donald Rumsfeld
[Bureaucrat, U.S. Secretary of Defense, b. 1932, Chicago, lives in St. Michaels, Maryland.]
...people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon.
(On photographs from Abu Ghraib prison.)
Willi Muenzenberg
[Photographer, politician, and propagandist, b. 1889, Erfurt, Germany, d. 1940, Paris.]
Photography has become an outstanding and indispensable means of propaganda in the revolutionary struggle.
