Sarah Charlesworth
[Artist, b. 1947, East Orange, New Jersey, d. 2013, Hartford, Connecticut.]
To live in a world of photographs is to live in a world of substitutes... or so it seems, whose actual referent is always the other, the described, the reality of a world once removed. I prefer, on the other hand, to look at the photographs as something real and of my world, a strange and powerful thing... part of a language, a system of communication, an economy of signs.
Jean Baudrillard
[Writer and theorist, b. 1929, Reims, France, d. 2007, Paris.]
Digital production erases the image as
analogon; it erases the real as something capable of being ‘imagined’.
Richard Prince
[Artist, b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone, lives in New York.]
... rather than tear [advertising photographs] out of the magazines and paste them up on a board, I thought why not re-photograph them with a camera and then put them in a real frame with a mat board around the picture just like a real photograph and call them mine. I mean “pirate” them, “steal” them, “sample” them.
Georges Méliès
[Filmmaker and magician, b. 1861, Paris, d. 1938, Paris.]
The trick, intelligently applied, today allows us to make visible the supernatural, the imaginary, even the impossible.
