Eddie Adams
[Photojournalist, b. 1933, New Kensington, Pennsylvania, d. 2004, New York.]
People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths.
Barbara DeGenevieve
[Photographer, artist, and curator, b. 1947, d. 2014, Chicago, Illinois.]
You can assume all photo and video is constructed as a fiction controlled by the person holding the camera and the person who is editing...
George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)
[Writer, b. 1903, Motihari, Bengal, India, d. 1950, London.]
It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Oglivy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence... Comrade Oglivy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.
George Bernard Shaw
[Writer, critic, and dramatist, b. 1856, Dublin, d. 1950, Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire, England.]
... the eyes of artist had been so long educated to accept the most grossly fictitious conventions as truths of representation that many of the truths of the focusing-screen were at first repudiated as grotesque falsehoods.
(1901)
Chuck Close
[Artist, b. 1940, Monroe, Washington, lives in New York.]
... I never said the camera was truth. It is, however, a more accurate and more objective way of seeing.
Philip Jones Griffiths
[Photojournalist, b. 1936, Rhuddian, Wales, d. 2008, London.]
The twentieth century was the time of photography, when almost everything of importance was recorded and considered true because it was photographed. Nowadays nearly anyone can produce a photograph of Ladybird Johnson standing on the grassy knoll with a smoking gun in her hand and no one can prove it’s a fake.
Larry Clark
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1943, Tulsa, Oklahoma, lives in New York.]
At the end of the day, what I show is real life. I tell the truth. And the truth can be shocking.
Anthony Aziz
... with the end of truth in photography has come a corresponding loss of trust; every image, every representation, is now a potential fraud. And as the eternal debate rages on about the appearance of truth and
truth itself, simulation is the only truth we can trust.
