Bernd Becher, Hilla Becher
[Photographer, b. 1931, Siegen, Germany, d. 2007, Rostock, Germany.]
[Photographer, b. 1934, Potsdam, d. 2015, Düsseldorf.]
Our camera does not produce pretty pictures, but exact duplications that, through our renunciation of photographic effects, turn out to be relatively objective. The photo can optically replace its object to a certain degree. This takes on special meaning if the object cannot be preserved.
Lewis Mumford
[Writer and critic, b. 1895, Flushing, New York, d. 1990, New York.]
Deliberately, on every historic occasion, we piously fake events for the benefit of photographers, while the actual event often occurs in a different fashion; and we have the effrontery to call these artful dress rehearsals “authentic historic documents.”
Sandy Skoglund
[Photographer, b. 1946, Quincy, Massachusetts, lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.]
My work involves the physical manifestation of emotional reality. Thus, the invisible becomes visible; the normal, abnormal; and the familiar, unfamiliar. Ordinary life is an endless source of fascination to me in its ritualistic objects and behavior.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is experienced as a letdown. Photographs make normative an experience of art that is mediated, second-hand, intense in a different way.
James Balog
[Photographer, b. 1952, lives in Boulder, Colorado.]
In some cases, I allow the edge of the set, the edge of my own artificial, artistic imposition, to show up because I don’t want to hide from that. I want to acknowledge that there is a living human and a living eye and a living mind and a living heart responding to what’s going on out there.
Andy Grundberg
[Critic, curator, and educator, lives in Washington, D.C.]
In the future, readers of newspapers and magazines will probably view news pictures more as illustrations than as reportage, since they can no longer distinguish between a genuine image and one that has been manipulated.
Langston Hughes
[Writer, b. 1902, Joplin, Missouri, d. 1967, New York.]
A picture, to be an interesting picture, must be more than a picture, otherwise it is only a reproduction of an object, and not an object of value in itself.
Man Ray (Emanuel Radnitsky)
[Artist, b. 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1976, Paris.]
I am not one of those who say: “That water can is blue, that house is pink,” or those who say: “Nothing is beautiful but truth, only truth is pleasant.” There are better things to do in life than copy... Isn’t it this perpetual mania of imitation that prevents man from being a god?
