Luigi Ghirri
[Photographer, b. 1943, Scandiano, Italy, d. 1992, Reggio Emilia, Italy.]
…photography is a language in which the difference between reproduction and interpretation, however subtle, exists and gives rise to an infinite number of imaginary worlds.
Robert Smithson
[Artist, b. 1938, Rutherford, New Jersey, d. 1973, Amarillo, Texas.]
There is something abominable about cameras, because they possess the power to invent many worlds. As an artist who has been lost in this wilderness of mechanical reproduction for many years, I do not know which world to start with. I have seen fellow artists driven to the point of frenzy by photography.
Victor Burgin
[Artist and writer, b. 1941, Sheffield, England, lives in London.]
The mind is not simply a
screen upon which the world projects its appearances; in “making something” of appearances the mind, in a sense, is also a
projector, projecting a world of things
onto those appearances.
Berenice Abbott
[Photographer, writer, teacher, b. 1898, Springfield, Ohio, d. 1991, Monson, Maine.]
There are many teachers who could ruin you. Before you know it you could be a pale copy of this teacher or that teacher. You have to evolve on your own.
Jean Baudrillard
[Writer and theorist, b. 1929, Reims, France, d. 2007, Paris.]
Reality itself founders in hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another, reproductive medium, such as photography. From medium to medium, the real is volatilized, becoming an allegory of death. But it is also, in a sense, reinforced through its own destruction. It becomes reality for it own sake, the fetishism of the lost object: no longer the object of representation, but the ecstasy of denial and of its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
[Artist, photographer, designer, and teacher, b. 1895, Bacsbarsod, Hungary, d. 1946, Chicago, Illinois.]
In photography we possess an extraordinary instrument for reproduction. But photography is much more than that. Today it is [a method for bringing optically] some thing entirely new into the world.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.
Nhem En
[Photographer, b. 1961, Kampong Leng, Kampong Chhnang, Cambodia, lives in Cambodia.]
I knew I was taking pictures of innocent people, but I knew that if I said anything I would be killed.
(En, official photographer at Khmer Rouge torture center Tuol Sleng, estimates he took photographs of 10,000 people arriving at the center. Eight survived.)
