Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
By nature, the photograph... has something tautological about it: a pipe, here, is always and intractably a pipe. It is as if the photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world.
Arthur Knight
[Writer and film critic, b. 1916, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1991, Sydney, Australia.]
Through this bright world the photographer walks like a zombie, blind unless a camera is strapped around his neck. The one time he appears without it is when he visits the clearing at night and discovers there the corpse. His immediate reaction is to run home for his camera. Only in a photograph does reality become meaningful for him.
(On the film “Blow-Up”)
Victor Burgin
[Artist and writer, b. 1941, Sheffield, England, lives in London.]
It is almost as unusual to pass a day without seeing a photograph as it is to miss seeing writing.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anaesthetize the injuries of class, race and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit the natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera’s twin capacities, to subjectivise reality and objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them.
Jean Baudrillard
[Writer and theorist, b. 1929, Reims, France, d. 2007, Paris.]
Every photographed object is merely the trace left behind by the disappearance of all the rest. It is an almost perfect crime, an almost total resolution of the world, which merely leave the illusion of a particular object shining forth, the image of which then becomes an impenetrable enigma.
Victor Burgin
[Artist and writer, b. 1941, Sheffield, England, lives in London.]
Our conviction that we are free to choose what we make of a photograph hides the complicity to which we are recruited in the very act of looking.
Allan Sekula
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1951, Erie, Pennsylvania, d. 2013, Los Angeles.]
[A] particularly obstinate bit of bourgeois folklore—the claim for the intrinsic significance of the photograph—lies at the center of the established myth of photographic truth. Put simply, the photograph is seen as a re-presentation of nature itself, as an unmediated copy of the real world. The medium itself is considered transparent.
Wright Morris
[Writer and photographer, b. 1910, Central City, Nebraska, d. 1998, Mill Valley, California.]
If there is a common photographic dilemma, it lies in the fact that so much has been seen, so much has been “taken,” there appears to be less to find. The visible world, vast as it is, through overexposure has been devalued.
