Wolfgang Tillmans
[Photographer, b. 1968, Remscheid, Germany, lives in London.]
The true authenticity of photographs for me is that they usually manipulate and lie about what is in front of the camera, but never lie about the intentions behind the camera.
Lincoln Kirstein
[Writer, critic, and impresario, b. 1907, Rochester, New York, d. 1996, New York.]
The candid camera is the greatest liar in the photographic family.... It is anarchic, naïve, and superficial.
Terence Donovan
[Photographer, b. 1936, Stepney, England, d. 1996, London.]
The magic of photography is metaphysical. What you see in the photograph isn’t what you saw at the time. The real skill of photography is organised visual lying.
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.
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.
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
[Writer, b. 1835, Hannibal, Missouri, d. 1910, Redding, Connecticut.]
The sun never looks through a photographic instrument that does not print a lie. The piece of glass it prints is well named a “negative”—a contradiction—a misrepresentation—a falsehood. I speak feelingly of this matter, because by turns the instrument has represented me to be a lunatic, A Solomon, a missionary, a burglar and an abject idiot.
(1866)
Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Photographs attract false beliefs the way flypaper attracts flies.
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.
