Rosalind Krauss
[Writer, critic, and historian, b. 1941, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]

 ... photography is an imprint or transfer off the real; it is a photochemically processed trace causally connected to the thing in the world to which it refers in a manner parallel to fingerprints or footprints or the rings of water that cold glasses leave on tables. The photograph is thus generically distinct from painting or sculpture or drawing. On the family tree of images it is closer to palm prints, death masks, the Shroud of Turin, or the tracks of gulls on beaches. 

Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]

 Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be. 

Pieter Hugo
[Photographer, b. 1976, Johannesburg, South Africa, lives in Cape Town.]

 [Photography’s] true seduction lies in its foot in reality. It still has the pretense of being a quasi-document. 

John Berger
[Writer and critic, b. 1926, London, d. 2017, Paris.]

 If no theoretical distinction has been made between the photograph as scientific evidence and the photograph as a means of communication, this has been not so much an oversight as a proposal. 

Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]

 Photographs may be taken—but we are also taken in by them. 

R. Crumb
[Cartoonist, b. 1943, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, lives in Sauve, France.]

 I couldn’t find any good pictures in magazines of ordinary modern street corners in America, so I persuaded this guy I knew in Sacramento — Stanley Something-or-other — to spend a day with me driving around just to take snapshots. 

Marc Riboud
[Photographer, b. 1923, St.-Genis-Laval, France, d. 2016, Paris.]

 The idea of photography as evidence is pure bullshit. A photo is no more proof of any reality than what you may hear being said by someone in a bus. We only record details, small fragments of the world. 

Lee Friedlander
[Photographer, b. 1934, Aberdeen, Washington, lives in New York.]

 The world makes up my pictures, not me. 
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