Stephen Shore
[Photographer, b. 1947, New York, lives in New York.]

 Even in ordinary reproduction [photography] verges on facsimile. 

José Saramago
[Writer, b. 1922, Azinhaga, Portugal, d. 2010, Tias, Las Palmas, Spain.]

 We are finally living in Plato’s cave, if we consider how those who were imprisoned within the cave—who could do nothing but watch those shadows passing on the back wall—were convinced that those shadows were their one and only reality. I see a profound similarity to all this in the epoch we’re now living in. We no longer live simply through images: we live through images that don’t even exist, which are the result not of physical projection but of pure virtuality. 

Garry Winogrand
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, d. 1984, Tijuana, Mexico.]

 We know too much about how photographs look... It is natural to make those pictures we know. It’s boring, you don’t learn anything that way. You keep making what you know. 

Robert Morris
[Artist and theorist, b. 1931, Kansas City, Missouri, lives in New York.]

 There is probably no defense against the malevolent powers of the photograph to convert every visible aspect of the world into a static, consumable image. 

Victor Burgin
[Artist and writer, b. 1941, Sheffield, England, lives in London.]

 The electronic image fulfills the condition of what Baudrillard has termed “the simulacrum”—it is a copy of which there is no original. It is precisely in this characteristic of digital photography, I believe, that we must locate the fundamental significance of digital photography in Western history. 

Saul Steinberg
[Artist, b. 1914, Râmnicu Sarat, Romania, d. 1999, New York.]

 It seems that photography has just been calisthenics, an illusion, an alibi for the real thing. 

Francis Galton
[Polymath, explorer, anthropologist, inventor, meteorologist, statistician, b. 1822, Birmingham, England, d. Haslemere, Surrey, England.]

 [My composite portrait process] represents no man in particular, but portrays an imaginary figure possessing the average features of any group of men. These ideal faces have a surprising air of reality. Nobody who glanced at one of them for the first time, would doubt its being the likeness of a living person, yet, as I have said, it is no such thing; it is the portrait of a type and not of an individual. (1879) 

Douglas Crimp
[Writer, theorist and critic, b. 1944, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, lives in Rochester, New York.]

 ...a great number of [photographic modes]... have to do with reproduction, with copies, and with copies of copies. The peculiar presence of this work is effected through absence, through its unbridgeable distance from the original, from even the possibility of an original. 
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