Robert Heinecken
[Photographer, b. 1931, Denver, d. 2006, Albuquerque, New Mexico.]

 I am interested in what I term gestalts; picture circumstances which bring together disparate images or ideas so as to form new meanings and new configurations. 

George Grosz
[Artist, b. 1893, Berlin, d. 1959, Berlin.]

 In 1916, when Johnny Heartfield and I invented photomontage in my studio at the south end of the town at five o’clock one May morning, we had no idea of the immense possibilities, or of the thorny but successful career, that awaited the new invention. On a piece of cardboard we pasted a mishmash of advertisements for hernia belts, student song books and dog food, labels from schnaps and wine bottles, and photographs from picture papers, cut up at will in such a way as to say, in pictures, what would have been banned by the censors if we had said it in words. 

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) 

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. 

Joan Fontcuberta
[Photographer, b. 1955, Barcelona, lives in Barcelona.]

 Among photojournalists there is still a sense that doing a photomontage is far graver than adding a filter. I am against this type of hierarchy that demonizes some options over others, demonizes them in respect to, what—ideology or moral code? 

Berenice Abbott
[Photographer, writer, teacher, b. 1898, Springfield, Ohio, d. 1991, Monson, Maine.]

 Suppose we took a thousand negatives and made a gigantic montage; a myriad-faceted picture combining the elegances, the squalor, the curiosities, the monuments, the sad faces, the triumphant faces, the power, the irony, the strength, the decay, the past, the present, the future of a city—that would be my favorite picture. 

Wolfgang Tillmans
[Photographer, b. 1968, Remscheid, Germany, lives in London.]

 I am interested not in individual readings, but in constructing networks of images and meanings capable of reflecting the complexity of the subject. 

Jonathan Green
[Writer, photographer, and curator, b. 1939, lives in Riverside, California.]

 Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” has been reinvented as the digital moment, a seamless presentation of constellations of separate, singular occurrences brought together into a coherent, seemingly “photographic” whole. 
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