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.
Katy Grannan
[Photographer, b. 1969, Arlington, Virginia, lives in Berkeley, California.]
I’ve always thought the family album is really a fiction. This was my first realization that photographs lie.
William Blake
[Poet and artist, b. 1757, London, d. 1827, London.]
Man is led to believe a lie, when he sees with, not through the eye.
(Aphorism adopted by Edward Weston)
Barbara Kruger
[Artist, b. 1945, Newark, New Jersey, lives in New York.]
Pictures and the words that mark or surround them seem to construct and contain us. From photos to movies, to TV, to home videos and computers, these pictures and words have the power to tell us who we are and who we aren’t, to dictate what we can and cannot be. But they also suggest that seeing is no longer believing and that what you see is not what you get.
Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
People often trust low-res images because they
look more real. But of course they are not more real, just easier to fake… You never see a 10-megapixel photograph of Big Foot or the Abominable Snowman or the Loch Ness Monster.
Martin Schoeller
[Photographer, b. 1968, Munich, Germany, lives in New York.]
I think all photographs lie. They capture such a small amount of a person’s personality, if they capture anything.
Frank Horvat
[Photographer, b. 1928, Abbazia, Italy, now Opatija, Croatia, lives in Paris.]
There’s this idea that photography is a kind of testimony and therefore we’re forbidden to tell lies with it. I think that’s nonsense. Photography isn’t testimony.
Joan Fontcuberta
[Photographer, b. 1955, Barcelona, lives in Barcelona.]
The idea that photography lies is based on a complete misunderstanding of what photography actually is or does. Photographs, by themselves, don’t do anything. They’re just photographs. But they can be made to tell a story or tall tale or outright lie when they are being placed in context, when they’re used to tell a story that might or might not be true.
