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.
Sarah Moon (Marielle Hadengue)
[Model and photographer, b. 1941, Paris, France, lives in Paris.]
I create situations that do not exist. I seek the truth from fiction.
Jo Ann Callis
[Photographer, b. 1940, Cincinnati, Ohio, lives in Los Angeles.]
I always think of photography as being out there and catching decisive moments and wonderful things that are happening and putting them together by juxtaposition. I never did that.
Geoffrey Batchen
[Photohistorian, b. 1956, Australia, lives in Wellington, New Zealand.]
The main difference seems to be that, whereas photography still claims some sort of objectivity, digital imaging is an
overtly fictional process. As a practice that is
known to be capable of nothing but fabrication, digitization abandons even the
rhetoric of truth that has been such an important part of photography’s cultural success.
Fred Ritchin
[Critic and writer, b. 1952, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]
The photograph that discovers and uncovers the world is harder to simulate than an image that simply illustrates one’s ideas about it.
Jo Ann Callis
[Photographer, b. 1940, Cincinnati, Ohio, lives in Los Angeles.]
I do like to control the image and create it and not just take what’s there.... But of course taking a picture is not like life. It’s “let’s pretend” for an hour...
Roger Ballen
[Photographer, b. 1950, New York, lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.]
You can’t just set things up and photograph them and expect the picture to “zap.” It is very important that the mind feels that there is a moment of truth or a moment of authenticity. It’s really crucial, because if the artist’s hand is seen as too strong, the pictures seem either dead or contrived.
Milan Kundera
[Writer, b. 1929, Brno, Bohemia (now Czechoslovakia), lives in Paris.]
The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.
