Jean Baudrillard
[Writer and theorist, b. 1929, Reims, France, d. 2007, Paris.]
The end of the spectacle brings with it the collapse of reality into hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another reproductive medium such as advertising or photography. 
Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
How foolish of me to have believed that it would be that easy. I had confused the appearance of trees and automobiles and people with reality itself and believed that a photograph of these appearances to be a photograph of it. It is a melancholy truth that I will never be able to photograph it and can only fail. I am a reflection photographing other reflections within a reflection. To photograph reality is to photograph nothing. Annette Messager
[Artist, b. 1943, Berck-sur-Mer, France, lives in Paris.]
I stick eyes back onI unstick ears
I cut off fingers
I tear off a breast
this is my law of exchanges
I carve up
I pull to pieces...
I give birth only to chimera
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
[Writer, b. 1835, Hannibal, Missouri, d. 1910, Redding, Connecticut.]
My dear Sir, I thank you very much for your letter and your photograph. In my opinion you are more like me than any other of my numerous doubles. I may even say that you resemble me more closely than I do myself. In fact, I intend to use your picture to shave by. Yours thankfully, S. Clemens.
(Reply to a man who sent him a photograph and claimed to be his double.) James McNeill Whistler
[Artist, b. 1834, Lowell, Massachusetts, d. 1903, London.]
The imitator is a poor kind of creature. If the man who paints only the face, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. Anthony Aziz
... with the end of truth in photography has come a corresponding loss of trust; every image, every representation, is now a potential fraud. And as the eternal debate rages on about the appearance of truth and truth itself, simulation is the only truth we can trust. Paul Theroux
[Writer, b. 1941, Medford, Massachusetts, lives in Cape Cod, Massachusetts and Haleiwa, Hawaii.]
“I’ve never seen Marilyn like that before,” a critic once said to me. “That’s not Marilyn,” I said. “It’s a picture.” Luigi Ghirri
[Photographer, b. 1943, Scandiano, Italy, d. 1992, Reggio Emilia, Italy.]
Reality is being transformed into a colossal photograph, and the montage already exists: it’s called the real world.