Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing has happened. The picture may distort; but there’s always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture.
Janet Malcolm
[Writer, b. 1934, Prague, Czechoslovakia, lives in New York.]
As time goes by and millions upon billions of photographs are cast into the world like so many blurry, hasty, and partial, if not false impressions, one’s confidence diminishes in the seeing-is-believing claims of photography, and one’s suspicion grows to a near-certainty that the camera is no better equipped than the eye to tell us what we want to know about the world.
(1976)
Philip Jones Griffiths
[Photojournalist, b. 1936, Rhuddian, Wales, d. 2008, London.]
Today, the photographer is sent off to illustrate the preconceptions, usually misconceptions, of the desk-bound editor—an editor biased not by any knowledge of the subject but by the pressure to conform to the standard view ordained by the powers that be. Any deviation from the ‘party line’ is rejected. We are probably the last generation that will accept the integrity of the photograph.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
The important thing is that the photograph possesses an evidential force, and that its testimony bears not on the subject but on time. From a phenomenological viewpoint, in the Photograph, the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation.
William J. T. Mitchell
[Writer, theorist, and architect, b. 1944, Melbourne, Australia, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
An interlude of false innocence has passed. Today, as we enter the post-photographic era, we must face once again the ineradicable fragility of our ontological distinctions between the imaginary and the real, and the tragic elusiveness of the Cartesian dream. We have indeed learnt to fix the shadows, but not to secure their meanings or to stabilize their truth values; they still flicker on the walls of Plato's cave.
Lawrence Alloway
[Writer, curator, and critic, b. 1927, London, d. 1990, New York.]
If “a print is the widow of the stone,” to quote Robert Rauschenberg, then a photograph is the twin of an event.
Lev Manovich
[Artist, theorist, and critic, b. 1960, Moscow, lives in New York.]
... the reason we think that computer graphics technology has succeeded in faking reality is that we, over the course of the last hundred and fifty years, have come to accept the image of photography and film as reality.
Alexander Gardner
[Photographer, b. 1821, Paisley, Scotland, d. 1882, Washington, D.C.]
Verbal representations of such places or scenes may, or may not, have the merit of accuracy; but photographic presentments of them will be accepted by posterity with an undoubting faith.
