Philip Jones Griffiths
[Photojournalist, b. 1936, Rhuddian, Wales, d. 2008, London.]
The twentieth century was the time of photography, when almost everything of importance was recorded and considered true because it was photographed. Nowadays nearly anyone can produce a photograph of Ladybird Johnson standing on the grassy knoll with a smoking gun in her hand and no one can prove it’s a fake.
Jeff Wall
[Photographer, b. 1946, Vancouver, Canada, lives in Vancouver.]
I’m struck by things I’ve seen, but I don’t photograph them. If they persist in my mind, I try to recreate them.
Douglas Crimp
[Writer, theorist and critic, b. 1944, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, lives in Rochester, New York.]
The strategy of the [directorial] mode is to use the apparent veracity of photography against itself, creating one’s fictions through the appearance of a seamless reality into which has been woven a narrative dimension.
(1980)
Justine Kurland
[Photographer, b. 1969, Warsaw, New York, lives mostly on the road.]
There’s something political about creating a world that you want to exist.
Arthur Tress
[Photographer, b. 1940, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Cambria, California.]
In my old age I no longer see the difference between documentary and staged.
(2012, age 71)
Roger Ballen
[Photographer, b. 1950, New York, lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.]
Nothing is staged. And nothing is already there. Everything is transformed through the camera.
Francis Galton
[Polymath, explorer, anthropologist, inventor, meteorologist, statistician, b. 1822, Birmingham, England, d. Haslemere, Surrey, England.]
[My composite portrait process] represents no man in particular, but portrays an imaginary figure possessing the average features of any group of men. These ideal faces have a surprising air of reality. Nobody who glanced at one of them for the first time, would doubt its being the likeness of a living person, yet, as I have said, it is no such thing; it is the portrait of a type and not of an individual.
(1879)
Pedro Meyer
[Photographer, b. 1935, Madrid, Spain, lives in Mexico City.]
I always found it rather pathetic that as a photographer I would be dependent to such a large extent on sheer luck... So the moment I was offered [digital] tools to bend the shape of the image into my choices, and not those of lady luck, I was hooked.
