Barbara Kruger
[Artist, b. 1945, Newark, New Jersey, lives in New York.]
Is it possible to construct a way of looking which welcomes the presence of pleasure and escapes the deceptions of desire? How do we, as women and as artists, navigate through the marketplace that constructs and contains us? I see my work as a series of attempts to ruin certain representations and to welcome a female spectator into the audience of men.
Paolo Pellegrin
[Photographer, b. 1964, Rome, lives in Paris.]
In my work, I present questions and concerns. [It’s] the opportunity to put a system of antibodies into circulation, without any pretense of making the world a better place, but to start a conversation with the world.
Vicki Goldberg
[Critic and writer, St. Louis, Missouri, lives in New York.]
Often what is nearest is hardest of all to see—try asking a fish to define water. Distance opens a door to revelation. When the first great distances of space were conquered by technology, a camera altered the human perspective on the Earth as radically as Galileo did when he proved the sun was the center of the universe. The ecology movement was born from a photographically altered consciousness.
Charles Moore
[Photographer, b. 1921, Hackleburg, Alabama, d. 2010, Palm Beach, Florida.]
Pictures can and do make a difference. Strong images of historical events do have an impact on society.
John Berger
[Writer and critic, b. 1926, London, d. 2017, Paris.]
The camera which isolates a moment of agony isolates no more violently than the experience of that moment isolates itself. The word
trigger, applied to the rifle and camera, reflects a correspondence which does not stop at the purely mechanical. The image seized by the camera is doubly violent...
Dave Hickey
[Writer and critic, b. 1939, rural Texas, lives in Los Angeles.]
...there are issues worth advancing in images worth admiring; and the truth is never “plain,” nor appearances ever “sincere.” To try to make them so is to neutralize the primary, gorgeous eccentricity of imagery in Western culture since the Reformation: the fact that it cannot be trusted, that imagery is always presumed to be proposing something contestable and controversial. This is the sheer, ebullient, slithering, dangerous fun of it. No image is presumed inviolable in our dancehall of visual politics, and all images are potentially powerful.
Philip Jones Griffiths
[Photojournalist, b. 1936, Rhuddian, Wales, d. 2008, London.]
What we get to think and know about the world is in the hands of a very few... A truly informed public is antithetical to the interests of modern consumer capital.
Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
If you photograph what’s before your eyes and you’re in an impoverished environment, you’re not—and shouldn’t be, I think—trying to change the world or commenting on this and saying: “Open up your heart and bleed for these people.” I would never dream of saying anything like that; it’s too presumptuous and naïve to think you can change society by a photograph or anything.
