Edmundo Desnoes
[Writer, b. 1930, Havana, Cuba, lives in New York.]

 Photography has fooled the world. There’s no more convincing fraud. Its images are nothing but the expression of the invisible man working behind the camera. They are not reality, they form part of the language of culture. 

Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]

 …the questioning of the photograph in its relation to the reality, the interrogation of representation, the famous crisis of representation, really all took place before digital technology. Digital technology, you see, is not the villain here. (1998) 

Eddie Adams
[Photojournalist, b. 1933, New Kensington, Pennsylvania, d. 2004, New York.]

 People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. 

José Saramago
[Writer, b. 1922, Azinhaga, Portugal, d. 2010, Tias, Las Palmas, Spain.]

 We are finally living in Plato’s cave, if we consider how those who were imprisoned within the cave—who could do nothing but watch those shadows passing on the back wall—were convinced that those shadows were their one and only reality. I see a profound similarity to all this in the epoch we’re now living in. We no longer live simply through images: we live through images that don’t even exist, which are the result not of physical projection but of pure virtuality. 

Saul Steinberg
[Artist, b. 1914, Râmnicu Sarat, Romania, d. 1999, New York.]

 It seems that photography has just been calisthenics, an illusion, an alibi for the real thing. 

Roger Ballen
[Photographer, b. 1950, New York, lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.]

 It is my belief that the most challenging photographs are those that create a tension between what we refer to as the real and the imaginative. 

John Szarkowski
[Curator, critic, historian, and photographer, b. 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, d. 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]

 Photography’s central sense of purpose and aesthetic: the precise and lucid description of significant fact. 

Hiroshi Sugimoto
[Photographer, b. 1948, Tokyo, lives in New York.]

 When people call me a photographer, I always feel like something of a charlatan—at least in Japanese. The word shashin, for photograph, combines the characters sha, meaning to reflect or copy, and shin, meaning truth, hence the photographer seems to entertain grand delusions of portraying truth. 
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