Ruth Bernhard
[Photographer, b. 1905, Berlin, d. 2006, San Francisco.]
If you are not willing to see more than is visible, you won’t see anything.
Sophie Ristelhueber
[Photographer, b. 1949, Paris, lives in Paris.]
We have at our disposal modern techniques for seeing everything, apprehending everything,
yet we see nothing.
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.
Josef Koudelka
[Photographer, b. 1938, Biskovice, Moravia, Czechoslovakia, lives in Paris.]
I never stay in one country more than three months. Why? Because I was interested in seeing, and if I stay longer I become blind.
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.
Paul Valéry
[Writer and poet, b. 1871, Sète, France, d. 1945, Paris.]
Thanks to photography, the eye grew accustomed to anticipate what it should see and to see it; and it learned not to see nonexistent things which, hitherto, it had seen so clearly.
Ad Reinhardt
[Artist, b. 1913, Buffalo, New York, d. 1967, New York.]
The eye is a menace to clear sight.
Wim Wenders
[Artist and filmmaker, b. 1945, Düsseldorf, lives in Berlin.]
An image that is unseen can’t sell anything. It is pure, therefore true, beautiful, in one word: innocent. As long as no eye contaminates it, it is in perfect unison with the world. If it is not seen, the image and the object it represents belong together.
