Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
The vast maw of modernity has chewed up reality and spat the whole mess out as images. 
R. Crumb
[Cartoonist, b. 1943, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, lives in Sauve, France.]
They were just snapshots, nothing special, nothing particularly artistic. They were used for utility purposes.(On photographs of mundane streetscapes he had “Stanley Something-or-other” take in Sacramento in 1988 to serve as backgrounds to his cartoons. “People don’t draw it, all this crap, people don’t focus attention on it because it’s ugly, it’s bleak, it’s depressing... But, this is the world we live in; I wanted my work to reflect that, the background reality of urban life.”)
Philip Jones Griffiths
[Photojournalist, b. 1936, Rhuddian, Wales, d. 2008, London.]
...we are there with our cameras to record reality. Once we start modifying that which exists, we are robbing photography of its most valuable attribute. André Kertész
[Photographer, b. 1894, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1985, New York.]
You do not have to imagine things; reality gives you all you need. Siegfried Kracauer
[Media critic and sociologist, b. 1889, Frankfurt, Germany, d. 1966, New York.]
The question is whether the image decisively catches reality. (1930) Anders Petersen
[Photographer, b. 1944, Solna, Sweden, lives in Stockholm.]
I can’t describe reality; at the most, I can try to capture things that seem to be valid, the way I see them. Luigi Ghirri
[Photographer, b. 1943, Scandiano, Italy, d. 1992, Reggio Emilia, Italy.]
Paradoxically perhaps… the moment a photographer thinks he is showing us reality is the moment when it is most distant. Lee Friedlander
[Photographer, b. 1934, Aberdeen, Washington, lives in New York.]
The world makes up my pictures, not me.