Joel-Peter Witkin
[Photographer, b. 1939, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.]
I think that what makes a photograph so powerful is the fact that, as opposed to other forms, like video or motion pictures, it is about stillness. I think the reason a person becomes a photographer is because they want to take it all and compress it into one particular stillness. When you really want to say something to someone, you grab them, you hold them, you embrace them. That's what happens in this still form.
Peter Wollen
[Writer, theorist, filmmaker, b. 1938, London, lives in Los Angeles.]
Photography is motionless and frozen, it has the cryogenic power to preserve objects through time without decay.
Jean-Luc Godard
[Filmmaker, b. 1930, Paris, lives in Rolle, Switzerland.]
There are no more simple images... The world is too much for an image. You need several of them, a chain of images...
Leon Golub
[Artist, b. 1922, Chicago, Illinois, d. 2004, New York.]
The freeze of a photographic gesture, the fix of an action, how an arm twists, how a smile gets momentarily stabilized or exaggerated—to try to get some of this is important... The photofix inflects the almost literal shaping of a figure, changes of movement or potential movement, and a sense of occurrence or event.
Joel Meyerowitz
[Photographer, b. 1938, New York, lives in New York.]
What I think is so extraordinary about the photograph is that we have a piece of paper with this image adhered to it, etched on it, which interposes itself into the plane of time that we are actually in at that moment. Even if it comes from as far back as 150 years ago, or as recently as yesterday, or a minute before as a Polaroid color photograph, suddenly you bring it into your experience. You look at it, and all around the real world is humming, buzzing and moving, and yet in this little frame there is stillness that looks like the world. That connection, that collision, that interfacing, is one of the most astonishing things we can experience.
Luc Delahaye
[Photographer, b. 1962, Tours, France, lives in Paris.]
I consider the act of taking pictures as an artistic performance in itself: a sum of movements, which have no finality other than their own perfection. I am the only viewer of this part. The consequence is “being there,” fully and simply, without affects or emotions.
Jacques Lacan
[Writer and psychoanalyst, b. 1901, Paris, France, d. 1981, Paris.]
The evil eye is the
fascinum, it is that which has the effect of arresting movement and, literally, of killing life. At the moment the subject stops, suspending his gesture, he is mortified. This anti-life, anti-movement function of the terminal point is the
fascinum, and it is precisely one of the dimensions in which the power of the gaze is exercised directly.
Justine Kurland
[Photographer, b. 1969, Warsaw, New York, lives mostly on the road.]
I drove from New York to California by myself. The iconography of travel and escape is everywhere in my photographs… So actually becoming a runaway was crucial. I had this idea that I'd make my way across the frontier and find my story as it was actually happening in the landscape.
