Yve Lomax
[Artist and theorist, b. 1952, Dorset, lives in London.]
Just when it is thought that we have progressed to the zenith of our modern world, a sudden wind picks up at midday: the sound of the signifier becomes a howl, an endless reverberation; we fear that the world has become hollow. We fear there is no central core. There is no presence immediate unto itself, no thing-in-itself. Nothing comes before, everything comes after. We are living in a ‘post’ world. A world without a fixed reference point. A world without origin.
John Heartfield (Helmut Franz Joseph Herzfeld)
[Artist, b. 1891, Munich, Germany, d. 1968, Berlin.]
... we used authentic shots of war, of the demobilization, of a parade of all the crowned heads of Europe, and the like. These shots brutally demonstrated the horror of war: flame thrower attacks, piles of mutilated bodies, burning cities; war films had not yet come into “fashion,” so these pictures were bound to have a more striking impact on the masses of the proletariat than a hundred lectures.
Tom Wolfe
[Writer, b. 1930, Richmond, Virginia, d. 2018, New York.]
Suddenly there is magic in such items... as random and eccentric framing, blurred images, keeling horizons, distorted scale, unreal colors (puce waters, chartreuse skies), grotesque foreshortening... and nightclub photo lighting with its flash overexposures and clotted shadows and inexplicable detail and tilted walls and stray items—arms, legs, shoes, cloven bottoms, anorexic elbows—appearing in an amputated condition about the edges... Once regarded as technical limitation of the medium, as annoyances to be overcome by professional expertise, they now become like animae, tree spirits, to be treated with reverence and looked to for guidance.
Simon Norfolk
[Photographer, b. 1963, Lagos, Nigeria, lives in Brighton, England.]
[My] pictures are about memory and forgetfulness. The evidence is dissolving. Bones crumble; human ash returns to soil; teeth, sandals, hair, bullets, axes disperse into atoms and molecules. Footprints in the snow will be erased by the next storm. The evidence of evil, like the evidence of good, obeys the universal laws of entropy. Heat cools, matter disintegrates, memories fade. If we let them.
Edgar Allan Poe
[Writer, b. 1809, Boston, Massachusetts, d. 1849, Baltimore, Maryland.]
[The daguerreotype] itself must undoubtedly be regarded as the most important, and perhaps the most extraordinary triumph of modern science.
Gerhard Richter
[Artist, b. 1932, Dresden, lives in Düsseldorf.]
I had had enough of bloody painting, and painting from a photograph seemed to me the most moronic thing that anyone could do.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Newer technology provides a nonstop feed: as many images of disaster and atrocity as we can make time to look at.
Allan Sekula
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1951, Erie, Pennsylvania, d. 2013, Los Angeles.]
Photography promises an enhanced mastery of nature, but photography also threatens conflagration and anarchy.
