Jean Baudrillard
[Writer and theorist, b. 1929, Reims, France, d. 2007, Paris.]
Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images.
Christian Metz
[Writer and film theorist, b. 1931, Béziers, France, lives in France.]
Photography is the mirror, more faithful than any actual mirror, in which we witness at every age, our own aging. The actual mirror accompanies us through time, thoughtfully and treacherously; it changes with us, so that we appear not to change.
Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
When I looked at things for what they are I was fool enough to persist in my folly and found that each photograph was a mirror of my Self.
Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen)
[Performance artist, b. 1943, Solingen, Germany, lives in Amsterdam.]
[A Polaroid camera] is like a delayed mirror. You take a picture, you wait three minutes and look again and again: is it me?
Philip K. Dick
[Writer, b. 1928, Chicago, Illinois, d. 1982, Santa Ana, California.]
When do I see a photograph, when a reflection?
Lee Friedlander
[Photographer, b. 1934, Aberdeen, Washington, lives in New York.]
I suspect it is for one’s self-interest that one looks at one’s surroundings and one’s self. This search is personally born and is indeed my reason and motive for making photographs. The camera is not merely a reflecting pool and the photographs are not exactly the mirror, mirror on the wall that speaks with a twisted tongue. Witness is borne and puzzles come together at the photographic moment which is very simple and complete. The mind-finger presses the release on the silly machine and it stops time and holds what its jaws can encompass and what the light will stain.
Peter Bunnell
[Writer and photo historian, b. 1937, Poughkeepsie, New York, lives in Princeton, New Jersey.]
You see in the photograph what you are.
Shelby Lee Adams
[Photographer, b. 1950, Hazard, Kentucky, lives in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]
[My] portraits are, in a way, self-portraits that represent a long autobiographical exploration of creativity, imagination, vision, repulsion and salvation. My greatest fear as a photographer is to look into the eyes of my subject and not see my own reflection.
