Leon Golub
[Artist, b. 1922, Chicago, Illinois, d. 2004, New York.]
People say: “But photographs are all lies.” That’s not the point. The lie is a truth, too. How the hell are we going to know what Kissinger looks like? Well, the photograph tells us one version; I’m trying to tell it also, but differently.
David Hockney
[Artist, b. 1937, Bradford, England, lives in Bridlington, Yorkshire; London; and Los Angeles.]
I can see it’s the end of chemical photography. We had this belief in photography, but that is about to disappear because of the computer. It can re-create something that looks like the photographs we’ve known. But it’s unreal. What’s that going to do to all photographs? Eh? It’s going to make people say: that’s not real—that’s just another invention… It’s like the ground being pulled from underneath us.
Christian Boltanski
[Artist, b. 1944, Paris, lives in Paris.]
In my first little book,
Tout ce qui reste de mon enfance of 1969, there is a photograph that supplies the apparent proof that I went on vacation to the seashore with my parents, but it is an unidentifiable photograph of a child and a group of adults on the beach. One can also see the bed I slept in when I was five years old; naturally, the caption orients the spectator, but the documents are purposely false.
Barbara Kruger
[Artist, b. 1945, Newark, New Jersey, lives in New York.]
... the thing that’s happening today vis-á-vis computer imaging, vis-á-vis alteration, is that it no longer needs to be based on the real at all. I don’t want to get into jargon—let’s just say that photography to me no longer pertains to the rhetoric of realism; it pertains more perhaps to the rhetoric of the unreal rather than the real or of course the hyperreal.
George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)
[Writer, b. 1903, Motihari, Bengal, India, d. 1950, London.]
It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Oglivy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence... Comrade Oglivy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.
André Kertész
[Photographer, b. 1894, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1985, New York.]
Of course a picture can lie, but only if you yourself are not honest or if you don’t have enough control over your subject.
John Loengard
[Photographer, editor, and critic, b. 1934, New York, lives in New York.]
To understand photographs, I believe you have to understand that the camera just shows what it shows. Photography may be moving, exciting, compassionate, or clever. But the camera cannot lie. Neither can a slide rule, a balance. If you want to lie, you have to do it with words.
Sarah Kember
[Writer and critic, lives in London.]
Computer manipulated and simulated imagery appears to threaten the truth status of photography even though that has already been undermined by decades of semiotic analysis. How can this be? How can we panic about the loss of the real when we know (tacitly or otherwise) that the real is always lost in the act of representation?
