Annette Messager
[Artist, b. 1943, Berck-sur-Mer, France, lives in Paris.]

 I never take a picture of a face because a face is somebody, an arm is not recognizable as somebody. When you take a photograph of someone’s face, it identifies it as somebody, but if you take just a fragment, it’s everybody. It’s not one person. 

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) 

Neil Postman
[Writer and media critic, b. 1931, New York, d. 2003, Queens, New York.]

 By itself photography cannot deal with the unseen, the remote, the internal, the abstract, it does not speak of “Man,” only of “a man”; not of “Tree,” only “a tree.” 

Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]

 I remember a long time ago when I first began to photograph I thought, there are an awful lot of people in the world and it’s going to be terribly hard to photograph all of them, so if I photograph some kind of generalized human being, everybody’ll recognize it. It’ll be like what they used to call the common man or something. It was my teacher, Lisette Model, who finally made it clear to me that the more specific you are, the more general it’ll be. 

Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]

 With a camera, one has to love individual cases. 

Marshall McLuhan
[Writer and theorist, b. 1911, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, d. 1980, Toronto, Canada.]

 Nobody can commit photography alone. 

Tracey Moffatt
[Photographer, b. 1960, Brisbane, Australia, lives in New York.]

 My work may feature brown faces but it could be anybody’s story. 

Philip-Lorca diCorcia
[Artist, b. 1953, Hartford, Connecticut, lives in New York.]

 The more specific the interpretation suggested by a picture, the less happy I am with it. 
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