Frederick Wiseman
[Filmmaker and Documentarian, b. 1930, Boston, Massachusetts, lives in Boston.]
The effort to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality.
Walker Evans
[Photographer, b. 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975, New Haven, Connecticut.]
The blind are not totally blind. Reality is not totally real.
Douglas McCulloh
[Photographer, b. 1959, Los Angeles, lives in Los Angeles.]
We live within an ever-deepening strata of visual iconography, sharing shifting signifiers up and down the layers of our lives. Eventually, we mistake abundance for vision. We become blind to our own blindness.
Franz Kafka
[Writer, b. 1883, Prague, d. 1924, Prague.]
Photography concentrates one’s eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can’t catch that even with the sharpest lens. One has to grope for it by feeling.
Judith Butler
[Philosopher and theorist, b. 1956, Cleveland, Ohio, lives in Berkeley, California.]
The critical image... must not only fail to capture its referent, but show its failure.
Michael Heizer
[Artist, b. 1944, Berkeley, California, lives in Hiko, Nevada.]
I have looked at so many photographs, I can not see them anymore.
Bernard-Henri Lévy
[Writer and critic, b. 1948, Béni Saf, Algeria, lives in St-Paul-de-Vence, France.]
No one wants to see; no one wants to hear. We have to force them to see it, then. There has to be a terrorism of the gaze.
Wim Wenders
[Artist and filmmaker, b. 1945, Düsseldorf, lives in Berlin.]
I think seeing happens partly through the eyes, but not entirely.
