Thomas Ruff
[Photographer, b. 1958, Zell, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf, Germany.]
Most of the photos we come across today aren’t really authentic anymore—they have the authenticity of a manipulated and prearranged reality. You have to know the conditions of a particular photograph in order to understand it properly because the camera just copes what is in front of it.
Jean-François Chevrier
[Art historian, critic, and curator, b. 1954, Lyon, France, lives in Paris.]
Many artists, having assimilated the Conceptualists’ explorations to varying degrees, have reused the painterly model and use photography, quite consciously and systematically, to produce works that stand alone and exist as “photographic paintings”...
Pedro Meyer
[Photographer, b. 1935, Madrid, Spain, lives in Mexico City.]
I no longer have to stand for twelve hours at a time inevitably exposed to all those chemicals in the darkroom. As I grow older and my vision increasingly fails me, I can still make up with experience what I lack in agility out in the field. When geometry and content miss their original appointment, I can try to make up for such a lost encounter. I can, like a gold miner, go back to all my old archives and find countless new veins and find new uses for my previous work.
Thomas Demand
[Photographer, b. 1964, Munich, Germany, lives in Los Angeles.]
[Once the photograph is taken], the sculpture is no longer that important, but nor is the photograph.... I have never thought in terms of my work culminating in pure photography.
The production of models is at the core of a complex process.... The surroundings I portray are for me something untouched, a utopic construction. No traces are visible on their surfaces, and time seems to have come to a stop. From this arises a paradoxical state of indeterminacy, which of course in one sense opposes the idea of momentariness (so important to the beginnings of photography) but also opposes the true nature of sculpture.
Vladimir Nabokov
[Writer, b. 1899, St. Petersburg, Russia, d. 1977, Montreux, Switzerland.]
...photographs of girl-children; some gaudy moth or butterfly, still alive, safely pinned to the wall.
Douglas Crimp
[Writer, theorist and critic, b. 1944, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, lives in Rochester, New York.]
...representation takes place because it is always already there in the world
as representation. It was, of course, [Edward] Weston who said that the photograph must be visualized in full before the exposure is made... The
a priori Weston had in mind was not really in his mind at all; it was in the world, and Weston only copied it.
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?
