Lady Elizabeth Eastlake (Elizabeth Rigby)
[Writer and photographer, b. 1809, London, d. 1893, London.]
[Photography] is made for the present age, in which the desire for art resides in small minority, but the craving, or rather the necessity for cheap, prompt, and correct facts in the public at large. Photography is the purveyor of such knowledge to the world. She is the sworn witness of everything presented to her view.
(1857) 
Allan Sekula
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1951, Erie, Pennsylvania, d. 2013, Los Angeles.]
[A] particularly obstinate bit of bourgeois folklore—the claim for the intrinsic significance of the photograph—lies at the center of the established myth of photographic truth. Put simply, the photograph is seen as a re-presentation of nature itself, as an unmediated copy of the real world. The medium itself is considered transparent.
Ken Domon
[Photographer, b. 1909, Sakata, Japan, d. 1990, Tokyo.]
If it is not realistic, it is not photography.
Christian Metz
[Writer and film theorist, b. 1931, Béziers, France, lives in France.]
Photography is linked with death in many different ways. The most immediate and explicit is the social practice of keeping photographs in memory of loved beings who are no longer alive. But there is another real death which each of us undergoes every day, as each day we draw nearer to our own death. Even when the person photographed is still living, that moment when she or he was has forever vanished.
John Szarkowski
[Curator, critic, historian, and photographer, b. 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, d. 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]
Photography was not invented to serve a clearly understood function. There was in fact widespread uncertainty, even among its inventors, as to what it might be good for.
Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
I used to have this notion when I was a kid that the minute you said anything, it was no longer true. Of course it would have driven me crazy very rapidly if I hadn’t dropped it, but there’s something similar in what I’m trying to say. That once it’s been done, you want to go someplace else.
Rudolf Arnheim
[Writer and psychologist, b. 1904, Berlin, Germany, d. 2007, Ann Arbor, Michigan.]
The fundamental peculiarity of the photographic medium; the physical objects themselves print their image by means of the optical and chemical action of light.
John Loengard
[Photographer, editor, and critic, b. 1934, New York, lives in New York.]
Occasionally we are misled by photography, but generally we have good reason to believe it.
