George Bernard Shaw
[Writer, critic, and dramatist, b. 1856, Dublin, d. 1950, Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire, England.]
The hand of the painter is incurably mechanical: his technique is incurably artificial... The camera... is so utterly unmechanical.
Louis Aragon
[Artist, poet, and writer, b. 1897, Neuilly, France, d. 1982, Paris.]
As we know, cubism was a reaction on the part of painters to the invention of photography. Photography and cinema made struggling for exact
likeness childish.
(1935)
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.
John Ruskin
[Artist, writer and poet, b. 1819, London, d. 1900, Coniston Water, England.]
I tell you (dogmatically, if you like to call it so, knowing it well) a square inch of man’s engraving is worth all the photographs that were ever dipped in acid... Believe me, photography can do against line engraving just what Madame Tussaud’s wax-work can do against sculpture. That and no more.
(1865)
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.
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.
Edward Steichen
[Photographer and curator, b. 1879, Luxembourg, Germany, d. 1973, West Redding, Connecticut.]
Every other artist begins [with] a blank canvas, a piece of paper... the photographer begins with the finished product.
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.
