Jean-François Chevrier
[Art historian, critic, and curator, b. 1954, Lyon, France, lives in Paris.]
Many artists, having assimilated the Conceptualists’ explorations to varying degrees, have reused the painterly model and use photography, quite consciously and systematically, to produce works that stand alone and exist as “photographic paintings”...
Edvard Munch
[Artist, b. 1863, Loten, Hedmark, Norway, d. 1944, Oslo, Norway.]
The camera cannot compete with painting so long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell.
John Currin
[Artist, b. 1962, Boulder, Colorado, lives in New York.]
I’ve always found paintings of nudes depressing because they can’t compete with photographs. The grainiest photograph of some girl, a blurry Polaroid—you’d rather look at that than the Venus de Milo, because you think, “Wow, that’s really somebody... This camera really was in front of this real naked lady.”
John Gutmann
[Photographer, b. 1905, Breslau, Germany, (now Wroclaw, Poland), d. 1998, San Francisco, California.]
To me, photography was a completely new medium, and I did not... feel the urge to transfer to it my ideas about painting.
Vik Muniz
[Artist, b. 1961, Sao Paulo, Brazil, lives in New York.]
Now that photography is a digital medium, the ghost of painting is coming to haunt it: photography no longer retains a sense of truth. I think that's great, because it frees photography from factuality, the same way photography freed painting from factuality in the mid-nineteenth century.
John Berger
[Writer and critic, b. 1926, London, d. 2017, Paris.]
A photograph is static because it has stopped time. A painting or drawing is static because it encompasses time.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
The adventurer in me felt obliged to testify with a quicker instrument than a brush to the scars of the world.
Jean-Dominique Ingres
[Artist, b. 1780, Montauban, France, d. 1867, Paris, France.]
Which of us could achieve this exactitude... this delicate modeling... indeed, what a wonderful thing photography is—but one dare not say that aloud.
