Ai Weiwei
[Artist, b. 1957, Beijing, lives in Beijing.]
...photographs are facts, but not necessarily true... The present always surpasses the past, and the future will not care about today.
Joan Fontcuberta
[Photographer, b. 1955, Barcelona, lives in Barcelona.]
I have always thought that the photographer does artistic work and that art consists of working with fictional premises.
Yukio Mishima
[Writer, b. 1925, Tokyo, d. 1970, Tokyo.]
This is a photograph, so it is as you see: there are no lies and no deceptions. One can detect here, elevated to an incomparably higher level, the same pathetic emotional appeal that lies concealed in every fake spiritualist photograph, every pornographic photograph; one comes to suspect that the strange, disturbing emotional appeal of the photographic art consists solely in that same repeated refrain: this is a true ghost... this is a photograph, so it is as you see: there are no lies, no deceptions.
Allan Sekula
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1951, Erie, Pennsylvania, d. 2013, Los Angeles.]
The only “objective” truth that photographs offer is the assertion that somebody or something... was somewhere and took a picture. Everything else, everything beyond the imprinting of a trace, is up for grabs.
Naomi Campbell
[Model and actress, b. 1970, Streatham, South London, England, lives in New York.]
I trust pictures, but no pictures made in my world—because I know what goes on.
Christian Boltanski
[Artist, b. 1944, Paris, lives in Paris.]
In most of my photographic pieces I have manipulated the quality of the evidence that people assign to photography, in order to subvert it, or to show that photography lies—that what it conveys is not reality but a set of cultural codes.
Rondal Partridge
[Photographer, b. 1917, San Francisco, d. 2015, Berkeley, California.]
Ansel [Adams] always jumped over the fence to photograph, walked past the garbage. He always looked to get an immaculate view, and I spent my life stepping back to include the garbage in my photographic view.
Andreas Feininger
[Photographer, b. 1906, Paris, France, d. 1999, New York.]
Once a photographer is convinced that the camera can lie and that, strictly speaking, the vast majority of photographs are “camera lies,” inasmuch as they tell only part of a story or tell it in distorted form, half the battle is won. Once he has conceded that photography is not a naturalistic medium of rendition and that striving for “naturalism” in a photograph is futile, he can turn his attention to using a camera to make more effective pictures.
