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.
Katy Grannan
[Photographer, b. 1969, Arlington, Virginia, lives in Berkeley, California.]
I’ve always thought the family album is really a fiction. This was my first realization that photographs 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.
Franz Kafka
[Writer, b. 1883, Prague, d. 1924, Prague.]
Nothing is as deceptive as a photograph.
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...
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.
Abelardo Morell
[b. 1948, Havana, Cuba, lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.]
There is a lot of social photography being done now to point to the untruth of photography. It’s getting very dull now. So, okay photography doesn’t tell the truth. So what? Everyone has known this forever.
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.
