August Sander
[Photographer, b. 1876, Herdorf, Germany, d. 1964, Cologne.]
From days of old, and in all periods, we find documents and books with pictures illustrating them, but photography has presented us with new possibilities and new tasks. It can depict things in magnificent beauty, but also in terrible truth, and can also deceive enormously. We must be able to bear seeing the truth, but above all we should hand down the truth to our fellow human beings and to posterity, be it favorable to us or unfavorable.
Marshall McLuhan
[Writer and theorist, b. 1911, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, d. 1980, Toronto, Canada.]
[Cameras] tend to turn people into things and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise and, [in the age of photography] the world itself becomes a sort of museum of objects that have been encountered before in some other museum and to say that “the camera cannot lie” is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name.
Pedro Meyer
[Photographer, b. 1935, Madrid, Spain, lives in Mexico City.]
Merging photographs can be more real than the isolated image because reality is so much more rich than just an isolated moment.
John Heartfield (Helmut Franz Joseph Herzfeld)
[Artist, b. 1891, Munich, Germany, d. 1968, Berlin.]
There are a lot of things that got me into working with photos. The main thing is that I saw both what was being said and not being said with photos in the newspapers… I found out how you can fool people with photos, really fool them… You can lie and tell the truth by putting the wrong title or wrong captions under them, and that’s roughly what was being done…
Chip Simons
[Photographer, b. 1958, Ohio, lives in Bosque Farms, New Mexico.]
We know [the dogs] are just sniffing at the camera, that there’s no personality or real intelligence in those apparently meaningful looks, but it’s what we want to believe that’s important. Photography’s the biggest lie ever, and the dog pictures are the believable lie.
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
[Writer, b. 1835, Hannibal, Missouri, d. 1910, Redding, Connecticut.]
... No photograph ever was good, yet, of anybody—hunger and thirst and utter wretchedness overtake the outlaw who invented it! It transforms into desperadoes the weakest of men; depicts sinless innocence upon the pictured faces of ruffians; gives the wise man the stupid leer of a fool, and the fool an expression of more than earthly wisdom.
Chuck Close
[Artist, b. 1940, Monroe, Washington, lives in New York.]
No one makes a nude if they’re not going to get turned on, and if they claim that they are making it for other reasons it’s an absolute lie.
Martine Franck
[Photographer, b. 1938, Antwerp, Belgium, d. 2012, Paris.]
A photograph is not necessarily a lie, but it isn’t the truth either. It’s more like a fleeting, subjective impression.
