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.
Edmundo Desnoes
[Writer, b. 1930, Havana, Cuba, lives in New York.]
...photography can lie as convincingly as literature or painting. The angle, the selected content, the assumed context.
Malick Sidibé
[Photographer, b. 1935, Soloba, Mali, d. 2016, Bamako, Mali.]
Photographs are reality: they never lie, and that’s important to me.
Auguste Rodin
[Artist, b. 1840, Paris, France, d. 1917, Paris.]
It is the artist who is truthful and photography which lies, for in reality time does not stop, and if the artist succeeds in producing the impression of a movement which takes several moments for accomplishment, his work is certainly much less conventional than the scientific image, where time is abruptly suspended.
Henry Adams
[Writer and historian, b. 1838, Boston, Massachusetts, d. 1918, Washington, D.C..]
I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.
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.
Thomas Struth
[Photographer, b. 1954, Geldern, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf.]
In certain cases, I asked people to stay fixed in their position, but the effect was already lost. Those photographs don’t work, because photography is so sensitive a medium that one can’t lie using it.
(On his “Museum Photographs”)
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...
