Patrick Demarchelier
[Photographer, b. 1943, Le Havre, France, lives in New York.]
Fashion is the opposite of the real, its worst enemy. Fashion photography is subversive; it makes you believe everything is true, whereas this could not be more false. It is the opposite of a mirror, a deformation.
Aleksander Rodchenko
[Artist, designer, architect, b. 1891, St. Petersburg, d. 1956, Moscow.]
Art has no place in modern life. It will continue to exist as long as there is a mania for the romantic and so long as there are people who love beautiful lies and deception... Every modern cultured man must wage war against art, as against opium... Photograph and be photographed.
Lewis Hine
[Photographer, writer, and reformer, b. 1874, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, d. 1940, New York.]
The photograph has an added realism of its own; it has an inherent attraction not found in other forms of illustration. For this reason the average person believes implicitly that the photograph cannot falsify. Of course, you and I know that this unbounded faith in the integrity of the photograph is often rudely shaken, for, while photographs may not lie, liars may photograph. It becomes necessary, then, in our revelation of the truth, to see to it that the camera we depend on contracts no bad habits.
(1909)
Andy Grundberg
[Critic, curator, and educator, lives in Washington, D.C.]
In the future, readers of newspapers and magazines will probably view news pictures more as illustrations than as reportage, since they can no longer distinguish between a genuine image and one that has been manipulated.
Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Couldn’t you argue that every photograph is posed because every photograph excludes something? Even in framing and cropping?
Edward Weston
[Photographer, b. 1886, Highland Park, Illinois, d. 1958, Wildcat Hill, California.]
Only with effort can the camera be forced to lie: basically it is an honest medium: so the photographer is much more likely to approach nature in a spirit of inquiry, of communion, instead of with the saucy swagger of self-dubbed “artists.”
Cindy Sherman
[Artist, b. 1954, Glen Ridge, New Jersey, lives in New York.]
Once I set up, the camera starts clicking, then I just start to move and watch how I move in the mirror. It’s not like I’m method acting or anything. I don’t feel that I am that person. I may be thinking about a certain story or situation, but I don’t become her. There’s this distance. The image in the mirror becomes her—the image the camera gets on the film. And the one thing I’ve always known is that the camera lies.
Larry Fink
[Photographer, b. 1941, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania.]
Human honesty and deception have been the core of my work. I am drawn to energy that is both constrained and unbounded and I try with the camera to fix the complexity of the moment: to create an infectious perception, so as to change the viewers’ aloof judgment to one of unavoidable, impassioned involvement.
