David LaChapelle
[Photographer, b. 1968, Connecticut, lives in New York.]
People say photos don’t lie. Mine do. I make mine lie.
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”)
Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Photographs attract false beliefs the way flypaper attracts flies.
Franz Kafka
[Writer, b. 1883, Prague, d. 1924, Prague.]
Nothing is as deceptive as a photograph.
Laurie Simmons
[Photographer, b. 1949, Long Island, New York, lives in New York.]
People are much more willing nowadays to believe that pictures lie than [that] they can express any kind of truth.
Judith Butler
[Philosopher and theorist, b. 1956, Cleveland, Ohio, lives in Berkeley, California.]
The critical image... must not only fail to capture its referent, but show its failure.
Pedro Meyer
[Photographer, b. 1935, Madrid, Spain, lives in Mexico City.]
Before, the myth of “photography doesn’t lie” was used in order to cover up tricks. If I [make a] portrait [of] you, accommodate you, illuminate you, put make up on you or use a filter, am I not manipulating reality? The only difference is that now I can do it from the computer in the postclick instead of the preclick. If I decide to photograph something instead of something else, I also manipulate reality. Of course a photograph can lie or commit abuse, but it always could.
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.
