Anthony Aziz, Sammy Cucher
Through developments in digital technology, photography has been freed once and for all from the rigid conventions of Realism. Like life itself, it is not capable of representing not just what is real, but what is possible.
Richard Prince
[Artist, b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone, lives in New York.]
If a picture was once worth a thousand words, one square inch of an image is now worth 360,000 bytes of computer storage space.
William J. T. Mitchell
[Writer, theorist, and architect, b. 1944, Melbourne, Australia, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
We can identify certain historical moments at which the sudden crystallization of a new technology (such as printing, photography, or computing) provides the nucleus for new forms of social and cultural practice and marks the beginning of a new era of artistic exploration. The end of the 1830s—the moment of Daguerre and Talbot—was one of these. And the opening of the 1990s will be remembered as another—the time at which the computer-processed digital image began to supersede the image fixed on silver-based photographic emulsion... . From the moment of its sesquicentennial in 1989 photography was dead—or, more precisely, radically and permanently displaced—as was painting 150 years before.
Nancy Burson
[Photographer and artist, b. 1948, St. Louis, Missouri, lives in New York.]
All of my early images were really visual experiments to me. They were attempts to answer unasked questions like, what happens if you put images of six men and six women together, or if we combined a monkey’s image with a human, would the result approximate an image of early man?
