Teju Cole
[Writer and photographer, b. 1975, Kalamazoo, Michigan, lives in Brooklyn, New York.]
Images make us think of other images. Photographs remind us of other photographs, and perhaps only the earliest photographs had a chance to evade this fate.
Michel Foucault
[Writer and philosopher, b. 1926, Poitiers, France, d. 1984, Paris, France.]
Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance.
Andy Grundberg
[Critic, curator, and educator, lives in Washington, D.C.]
[Postmodern photography] implies the exhaustion of the image universe: it suggests that a photographer can find more than enough images already existing in the world without the bother of making new ones.
Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
In a world of images… nothing stands still or gets heavy—the world is leaping bursting dancing splattering shattering well-used and tireless.
Wright Morris
[Writer and photographer, b. 1910, Central City, Nebraska, d. 1998, Mill Valley, California.]
Images proliferate. Am I wrong in being reminded of printing money in a period of wild inflation? Do we know what we are doing? Are we able to evaluate what we have done?
Franz Kafka
[Writer, b. 1883, Prague, d. 1924, Prague.]
Your sight does not master the pictures, it is the pictures that master your sight.
Don DeLillo
[Writer, b. 1936, New York, lives in New York.]
We’re not here to capture an image. We’re here to maintain one. (On photographers shooting “the most photographed barn in America.”)
Thomas Ruff
[Photographer, b. 1958, Zell, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf, Germany.]
Photographs are still always depictions, it's just that for my generation the model for the photograph is probably not reality any more, but images we have of that reality.