William J. T. Mitchell
[Writer, theorist, and architect, b. 1944, Melbourne, Australia, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
We are surrounded by pictures; we have an abundance of theories about them, but it doesn’t seem to do us any good. Knowing what pictures are doing, understanding them, doesn’t seem necessarily to give us power over them.
Martha Rosler
[Artist, b. 1943, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New York.]
Photography [can] be seen as a system of representation that you bring to bear on other systems.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there
beyond?
Luigi Ghirri
[Photographer, b. 1943, Scandiano, Italy, d. 1992, Reggio Emilia, Italy.]
Instead of seeking to introduce new situations and ways of working, photography has moved into a phase of obsessively reproducing itself.
(1985)
Mel Bochner
[Artist, b. 1940, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
Photography was seen as the enemy of all the values of late modernism… and as things turned out, it was.
Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
Photographs no longer provoke a meditation upon external phenomena, but on the conditions of their own existence.
Gerhard Richter
[Artist, b. 1932, Dresden, lives in Düsseldorf.]
To make a photograph is already the first artificial act.
Sherrie Levine
[Artist, b. 1947, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
The world is filled to suffocating. Man has placed his token on every stone. Every word, every image, is leased and mortgaged. We know that a picture is but a space in which a variety of images, none of them original, blend and clash.
