Andreas Gursky
[Photographer, b. 1955, Leipzig, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf.]
Paradoxically, this view of the Rhine cannot be obtained
in situ; a fictitious construction was required to provide an accurate image of a modern river.
(On his photograph Rhein II
) 
George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)
[Writer, b. 1903, Motihari, Bengal, India, d. 1950, London.]
Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxwork displays, film shows, telescreen programs all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked.
It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Oglivy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence... Comrade Oglivy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.
Joe Rosenthal
[Photographer, b. 1911, Washington, D.C., d. 2006, Novato, California.]
It has been done in oils, water colors, pastels, chalk and match sticks. A float based on it won a prize in a Rose Bowl parade, and the flag-raising has been re-enacted by children, by gymnasts... and as a part of the Orange Bowl pageant in Miami. It has been sculpted in ice and in hamburger.
(On his photograph of U.S. Marines raising the American flag on Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima.)
Richard Prince
[Artist, b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone, lives in New York.]
What I find is that the taking, the stealing, the appropriation of images has to do with prior availability, and it sets up a degree where things can be shared... It’s like 50% off... You can let something of another emotion or another personality sign on your work, or co-sign it.
Sally Mann
[Photographer, b. 1951, Lexington, Virginia, lives in Lexington.]
The fact is that these are not my children; they are figures on silvery paper slivered out of time. They represent my children at a fraction of a second on one particular afternoon with infinite variables of light, expression, posture, muscle tension, mood, wind and shade. These are not my children at all; these are children in a photograph.
Jeff Wall
[Photographer, b. 1946, Vancouver, Canada, lives in Vancouver.]
[Near documentary] means that they are pictures whose subjects were suggested by my direct experience, and ones in which I tried to recollect that experience as precisely as I could, and to reconstruct and represent it precisely and accurately.
John Gossage
[Photographer, b. 1946, Staten Island, New York, lives in Washington D.C..]
You can do anything you like, it’s all fiction.
