Laurie Simmons
[Photographer, b. 1949, Long Island, New York, lives in New York.]
People are much more willing nowadays to believe that pictures lie than [that] they can express any kind of truth.
Margaret Bourke-White
[Photographer, b. 1904, New York, d. 1971, Darien, Connecticut.]
In photographing the murder camps, the protective veil was so tightly drawn that I hardly knew what I had taken until I saw prints of my own photographs.
Sarah Kember
[Writer and critic, lives in London.]
Computer manipulated and simulated imagery appears to threaten the truth status of photography even though that has already been undermined by decades of semiotic analysis. How can this be? How can we panic about the loss of the real when we know (tacitly or otherwise) that the real is always lost in the act of representation?
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Contrary to what is suggested by the humanist claims made for photography, the camera’s ability to transform reality into something beautiful derives from its relative weakness as a means of conveying the truth.
Joel Sternfeld
[Photographer, b. 1944, New York, lives in New York.]
No individual photo explains anything. That’s what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium. It is the photographer’s job to get this medium to say what you need it to say. Because photography has a certain verisimilitude, it has gained a currency as truthful—but photographs have always been convincing lies.
Franz Kafka
[Writer, b. 1883, Prague, d. 1924, Prague.]
Your sight does not master the pictures, it is the pictures that master your sight.
Wim Wenders
[Artist and filmmaker, b. 1945, Düsseldorf, lives in Berlin.]
Images are no longer what they used to be. They can’t be trusted any more. We all know that. You know that. When we grew up, images were telling stories and showing them. Now they’re all into selling. They’ve changed under our very eyes. They don’t even know how to do it anymore. They’ve plain forgotten. Images are selling out the world. And at a big discount.
Abelardo Morell
[b. 1948, Havana, Cuba, lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.]
There is a lot of social photography being done now to point to the untruth of photography. It’s getting very dull now. So, okay photography doesn’t tell the truth. So what? Everyone has known this forever.
