Mark Klett
[Photographer, b. 1952, Albany, New York, lives in Tempe, Arizona.]
So much of what we know, and what we think we know, about the land has first passed through someone's lens. The interesting thing is to make use of this history, not merely to be absorbed into it. For me, landscape photographs begin as the artifacts of personal moments. They get interesting when they become cultural commentary.
Douglas Crimp
[Writer, theorist and critic, b. 1944, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, lives in Rochester, New York.]
...photography not only secures the admittance of various objects, fragments of objects, details of objects to the museum, it is also the organizing device: it reduces the now even vaster heterogeneity to a single perfect similitude. Through photographic reproduction a cameo takes up residence on the page next to painted tondo or a sculpted relief...
Theodor Adorno
[Writer, b. 1903, Frankfurt, Germany, d. 1969, Visp, Switzerland.]
The objective tendency of the Enlightenment, to wipe out the power of images over man, is not matched by any subjective progress on the part of enlightened thinking towards freedom from images.
Garry Winogrand
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, d. 1984, Tijuana, Mexico.]
The photograph isn’t what was photographed. It’s something else. It’s a new fact.
Henry James
[Writer, b. 1843, New York, d. 1916, Rye, England.]
Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better the problem is solved.
André Breton
[Artist, writer, editor, and critic, b. 1896, Tinchebray, France, d. 1966, Paris, France.]
It will in the end, be admitted that everything, in effect
is an image and that the least object which has no symbolic role assigned to it is capable of standing for absolutely anything.
Daniel Boorstin
[Historian and scholar, b. 1914, Atlanta, Georgia, d. 2004, Washington, D.C.]
The most refined skills of color printing, the intricate techniques of wide-angle photography, provide us pictures of trivia bigger and more real than life. We forget that we see trivia and notice only that the reproduction is so good. Man fulfils his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera—and himself.
Charles Baudelaire
[Writer, b. 1821, Paris, d. 1867, Paris.]
Our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze on its trivial image on a scrap of metal.
