Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
With the advent of photography, images are torn free of the world, snatched from the fabric of reality, and enshrined as separate entities; they become more like dreams. It is no wonder that we really don’t know how to deal with them.
Richard Prince
[Artist, b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone, lives in New York.]
By generating what appears to be a double, it might be possible to represent what the original photograph or picture
imagined... More technological than mechanical, more a simulation than an expression, the result is a photograph that’s
the closest thing to the real thing. And since I feel a bit more comfortable, perhaps more reassured around a picture that appears to be truer than it really is, I find the best way for me to make it real is to make it again, and making it again is enough for me and certainly, personally speaking, almost me.
Charles Baudelaire
[Writer, b. 1821, Paris, d. 1867, Paris.]
If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.
Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
When gifts are given to me through my camera, I accept them graciously.
Richard Prince
[Artist, b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone, lives in New York.]
... rather than tear [advertising photographs] out of the magazines and paste them up on a board, I thought why not re-photograph them with a camera and then put them in a real frame with a mat board around the picture just like a real photograph and call them mine. I mean “pirate” them, “steal” them, “sample” them.
Barbara Kruger
[Artist, b. 1945, Newark, New Jersey, lives in New York.]
As long as pictures remain powerful, living conventions within culture, I’ll continue to use them and turn them around. Texts, pictures, projections—I want to keep the plurality of practices going.
