Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.
Sabrina Harman
[U.S. military guard at Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq, b. 1978, Lorton, Virginia, lives in Virginia.]
If I come up to you and I’m like, “Hey this is going on,” you probably wouldn’t believe me unless I had something to show you. So if I say “Hey this is going on. Look, I have proof,” you can’t deny it, I guess.
(On why she took the infamous photos of abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq)
A.D. Coleman
[Critic and writer, b. 1943, New York, lives in New York.]
Photographing appears to be nothing more than concretized seeing, and seeing is believing.
Susie Linfield
[Writer and critic, New York, lives in New York.]
Photographs excel, more than any other form of either art or journalism, in offering an immediate, viscerally emotional connection to the world…. [We] turn to photographs… for a glimpse of what cruelty, or strangeness, or beauty, or agony, or love, or disease, or natural wonder, or artistic creation, or depraved violence, looks like.
Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.
John Szarkowski
[Curator, critic, historian, and photographer, b. 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, d. 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]
More convincingly than any other kind of picture, a photograph evokes the tangible presence of reality. It’s most fundamental use and its broadest acceptance has been as a substitute for the object itself—a simpler, more permanent, more clearly visible version of the plain fact. Our faith in the truth of a photograph rests on our belief that the lens in impartial, and will draw the subject as it is, neither nobler nor meaner.
Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
They say seeing is believing, but the opposite is true. Believing is seeing.
Anthony Aziz
... with the end of truth in photography has come a corresponding loss of trust; every image, every representation, is now a potential fraud. And as the eternal debate rages on about the appearance of truth and
truth itself, simulation is the only truth we can trust.
