Elizabeth McCausland
[Writer and critic, b. 1899, Wichita, Kansas, d. 1965, New York.]
‘The camera eye cannot lie’ is lightly said. On the contrary, the camera eye usually does nothing but lie, rationalizing the wrinkles of an aging face, obligingly overlooking peeling paint and rotting wood. But the external world is those facts of decay and change, of social retrogression and injustice...
Douglas Coupland
[Writer, b. 1961, Baden-Söllingen, Germany, lives in Vancouver, Canada.]
When you crop the photo, you tell a lie.
Rineke Dijkstra
[Photographer, b. 1959, Sittard, The Netherlands, lives in Amsterdam.]
A photo is always a kind of lie. Truth is only present for a matter of a fraction of a second.
Martha Rosler
[Artist, b. 1943, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New York.]
The question at hand is the danger posed to
truth by computer-manipulated photographic imagery. How do we approach this question in a period in which the veracity of even the
straight, unmanipulated photograph has been under attack for a couple of decades.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Contrary to what is suggested by the humanist claims made for photography, the camera’s ability to transform reality into something beautiful derives from its relative weakness as a means of conveying the truth.
Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Photography can lead us astray, we can be tricked by ocular proof. And photography—and I believe this is the right verb—can entice us into error.
Malick Sidibé
[Photographer, b. 1935, Soloba, Mali, d. 2016, Bamako, Mali.]
Photographs are reality: they never lie, and that’s important to me.
Joan Fontcuberta
[Photographer, b. 1955, Barcelona, lives in Barcelona.]
Every photograph is a fiction with pretensions to truth. Despite everything that we have been inculcated, all that we believe, photography always lies; it lies instinctively, lies because its nature does not allow it to do anything else.
