Allan Sekula
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1951, Erie, Pennsylvania, d. 2013, Los Angeles.]
A truly critical social documentary will frame the crime, the trial, and the system of justice and its official myths. Artists working toward this end may or may not produce images that are theatrical and overtly contrived, they may or may not present texts like fiction. Social truth is something other than a manner of convincing style.
James Casebere
[Photographer, b. 1953, Lansing, Michigan, lives in New York.]
The novels by Latin American magical realists showed how history is rewritten by each successive military dictatorship. I look at photography the same way: as a fiction, as representative of a particular point of view.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Photography is seen as an acute manifestation of the individualized “I,” the homeless private self astray in an
overwhelming world—mastering reality by a fast visual anthologizing of it. Or photography is seen as a means
of finding a place in the world (still experienced as overwhelming, alien) by being able to relate to it with
detachment—bypassing the interfering, insolent claims of the self.
Robert Doisneau
[Photographer, b. 1912, Gentilly, Val-de-Marne, France, d. 1994, Montrouge, France.]
You know, they always say that the photographer is “a hunter of images.” That is a flattering image, the idea of a hunter, it’s virile, acquired power. Actually though, it isn’t that. We are really fishermen with hooks and lines.
Paolo Roversi
[Photographer, b. 1947, Ravenna, Italy, lives in Paris.]
Every photograph is like a moment of seductive love even if there is no intercourse.
Maggie Steber
[Photographer, b. 1949, born in Electra, Texas, lives in Miami, Florida.]
Every time we click the shutter, it’s like a new day, a new chance to make a clean start, to be original. It’s a very exciting and exhausting thing to do.
Edmundo Desnoes
[Writer, b. 1930, Havana, Cuba, lives in New York.]
Photographs are detonators. They explode in us. We are the gaze as well as the gazed-at. The observer and the observed.
Daido Moriyama
[Photographer, b. 1938, Ikeda-cho, Osaka, Japan, lives in Tokyo.]
For me, photography is not a means by which to create beautiful art, but a unique way of encountering genuine reality at the point where the enormous fragments of the world — which I can never completely embrace by taking photos — coincide with my own inextricable predicament.
