William J. T. Mitchell
[Writer, theorist, and architect, b. 1944, Melbourne, Australia, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
We can identify certain historical moments at which the sudden crystallization of a new technology (such as printing, photography, or computing) provides the nucleus for new forms of social and cultural practice and marks the beginning of a new era of artistic exploration. The end of the 1830s—the moment of Daguerre and Talbot—was one of these. And the opening of the 1990s will be remembered as another—the time at which the computer-processed digital image began to supersede the image fixed on silver-based photographic emulsion... . From the moment of its sesquicentennial in 1989 photography was dead—or, more precisely, radically and permanently displaced—as was painting 150 years before.
Kansuke Yamagata
[Photographer and poet, b. 1914, Nagoya, Japan, d. 1987, Nagoya.]
The surreal exists within the real. Tireless experimentation with new photography leads to the creation of a new beauty.
Gordon Parks
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1912, Fort Scott, Kansas, d. 2006, New York.]
What the camera had to do was expose the evils of racism, the evils of poverty, the discrimination and the bigotry, by showing the people who suffered most under it.
John Heartfield (Helmut Franz Joseph Herzfeld)
[Artist, b. 1891, Munich, Germany, d. 1968, Berlin.]
Photography is a mechanical device; photomontage is a piece of work done with the products of photography. This entire process forms one whole... If I assemble documents and juxtapose them with intelligence and skill, the effect of agitation and propaganda on the masses will be enormous.
Marilyn Nance
[Photographer and artist, b. 1953, New York, lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.]
Things haven’t really changed for black folks, and we know it. The old folks know it. The middle-aged folks know it. Young folks know it—we all know it. We nod to each other when we see ourselves on the street. (That’s why white folks think all black folks know each other.) We share a secret... that we are human beings, that we love, that we invent, that we brush our teeth, that we vacuum our rugs, that we throw out our junk mail. All of that. We carry in each of us all the stories that are withheld from the history books and kept out of the media, erased from common knowledge. My work deals with the souls of black folks and our quest for social change... I’m being asked to tell my story of how things haven't really changed.
Jerry Uelsmann
[Photographer, b. 1934, Detroit, Michigan, lives in Gainesville, Florida.]
Cannot the mind, when introduced to the possibilities of in-process discovery, stretch the boundaries of the preconceived image?
Gordon Parks
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1912, Fort Scott, Kansas, d. 2006, New York.]
I had known poverty firsthand, but there I learned how to fight its evil—along with the evil of racism—with a camera.
Peter Schjeldahl
[Writer and critic, b. 1942, Fargo, North Dakota, lives in New York.]
Photography is the art of anticipation, not working with memories, but showing their formation. As such, it has relentlessly usurped imaginative and critical prerogatives of older, slower literature and handmade visual art.
