Arthur Danto
[Writer, b. 1924, Ann Arbor, Michigan, d. 2013, New York.]
It takes a certain suspension of squeamishness to see a Polaroid that Mapplethorpe devoted to his own engorged penis, held erect like a blunt club by means of a leather loop around his testicles, in the same aesthetic terms as the Photo-Secessionist masterpieces ... But that was the paradox of Mapplethorpe’s achievement—to show what one can barely stand to look at in photographs so beautiful one can hardly takes one’s eye off them.
Joel-Peter Witkin
[Photographer, b. 1939, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.]
I’ve come to realize that the mark is the primal gesture, the internal connection of the caveman to the cosmos; an impossibility similar to an impulse in an insect’s nervous system that it could somehow reduce to dust a steel beam by endlessly crawling over it.
Wim Wenders
[Artist and filmmaker, b. 1945, Düsseldorf, lives in Berlin.]
Images are no longer what they used to be. They can’t be trusted any more. We all know that. You know that. When we grew up, images were telling stories and showing them. Now they’re all into selling. They’ve changed under our very eyes. They don’t even know how to do it anymore. They’ve plain forgotten. Images are selling out the world. And at a big discount.
Franz Kafka
[Writer, b. 1883, Prague, d. 1924, Prague.]
A picture of my existence... would show a useless wooden stake covered in snow... stuck loosely at a slant in the ground in a ploughed field on the edge of a vast open plain on a dark winter night.
Oscar Wilde
[Writer, b. 1854, Dublin, d. 1900, Paris, France.]
The camera, you know, will never capture you. Photography, in my experience, has the miraculous power of transferring wine into water.
Nastassja Kinski
[Model and actress, b. 1959, West Berlin, Germany, lives in Los Angeles and Europe.]
When I cannot get that moment of truth where you feel yourself opening up like a flower, I absolutely loathe the bloody camera. I can just feel this black hole eyeing me, sucking me in, and I feel like smashing it to smithereens.
James Joyce
[Writer, b. 1882, Rathgar, Ireland, d. 1941, Zurich, Switzerland.]
...Ill make him feel all over him till he half faints under me then hell write about me lover and mistress publicly too with our 2 photographs in all the papers when he becomes famous...
Joe Rosenthal
[Photographer, b. 1911, Washington, D.C., d. 2006, Novato, California.]
It has been done in oils, water colors, pastels, chalk and match sticks. A float based on it won a prize in a Rose Bowl parade, and the flag-raising has been re-enacted by children, by gymnasts... and as a part of the Orange Bowl pageant in Miami. It has been sculpted in ice and in hamburger.
(On his photograph of U.S. Marines raising the American flag on Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima.)
