Don DeLillo
[Writer, b. 1936, New York, lives in New York.]
In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too.
Garry Winogrand
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, d. 1984, Tijuana, Mexico.]
The photograph isn’t what was photographed. It’s something else. It’s a new fact.
Fred Ritchin
[Critic and writer, b. 1952, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]
The “decisive moment,” the popular Henri Cartier-Bresson approach to photography in which a scene is stopped and depicted at a certain point of high visual drama, is now possible to achieve at any time. One’s photographs, years later, may be retroactively “rephotographed” by repositioning the photographer or the subject of the photograph, or by adding elements that were never there before but now are made to exist concurrently in a newly elastic sense of space and time.
A.D. Coleman
[Critic and writer, b. 1943, New York, lives in New York.]
To work in the directorial mode requires a photographer to violate more than a hundred years of trust in order to engage voluntarily in active deception. As a rule it involves an image-maker in a symbology that is not “found” but consciously chosen, imposed, and explored.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau
[Writer and theorist, b. 1947, New York, lives in Santa Barbara, California.]
While the aesthetics of consumption (photographic or otherwise) requires a heroicized myth of the artist, the exemplary practice of the player-off codes requires only an operator, a producer, a scriptor, or a pasticheur.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
When you drop a stone into a well, there's no telling how far it will echo. So it is with photographs. When you allow one to be circulated, it escapes your control.
Jason Fulford
[Photographer, b. 1973, Atlanta, Georgia, lives in Scranton, Pennsylvania.]
We all are influenced by things and copy things, but often where there is a certain level of copying, only the surface value ends up being reproduced and that becomes thinner and thinner. I feel like a lot of appropriation suffers from that.
