Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment... It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world.
Pedro Meyer
[Photographer, b. 1935, Madrid, Spain, lives in Mexico City.]
I had no intention of waiting a week, ten days or the time necessary so that something would happen, so that I could get the “decisive moment” looked for so often by photographers... The specific “decisive moment” wasn’t to be found, it had to be created.
Alfredo Jarr
[Artist, b. 1956, Santiago, Chile, lives in New York.]
For me, what was important was to record everything I saw around me, and to do this as methodically as possible. In these circumstances a “good photograph” is a picture that comes as close as possible to reality. But the camera never manages to record what your eyes see, or what you feel at the moment. The camera always creates a new reality.
Kevin Bacon
[Actor, b. 1958, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
They took 3-D digital photographs of my entire body. I had to pose stark naked, assuming a kind of Spider-Man position. After a minute, one of the technicians pointed to my genitals and said, “Um, we’re not getting enough data there”... It wasn’t what you think. It turns out that the fancy digital camera doesn’t pick up dark areas too well, and they were having trouble because of the hair down there. I actually had to spray on this highlighter stuff.
(On having digital photos taken for the invisible man role in the film Hollow Man)
Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus)
[Poet and philosopher, b. 99 BC, Rome, d. 55 BC, Rome.]
There exist what we call images (simulacra) of things; which, like films drawn from the outermost surface of things, flit about hither and thither through the air, it is these same that, encountering us in wakeful hours, terrify our minds, as also in sleep, when we often seem to behold wonderful shapes and images of the dead... lest by chance we should think that spirits escape from Acheron or ghosts flit about amongst the living... . I say, therefore, that semblances and thin shapes of things are thrown off from the outer surface, which are to be called as it were their films or bark, because the images bears a look and shape like the body of that from which it is shed to go on its way.
E. H. Gombrich
[Historian and writer, b. 1909, Vienna, Austria, d. 2001, London.]
All art is “image making” and all image making is the creation of substitutes.
Wynn Bullock
[Photographer, b. 1902, Chicago, Illinois, d. 1975, Monterey, California.]
A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.
Thomas Ruff
[Photographer, b. 1958, Zell, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf, Germany.]
Photography pretends to show reality. With your technique you have to go as near to reality as possible in order to imitate reality. And when you come so close then you recognize that, at the same time, it is not.
