Luigi Ghirri
[Photographer, b. 1943, Scandiano, Italy, d. 1992, Reggio Emilia, Italy.]
Reality is being transformed into a colossal photograph, and the montage already exists: it’s called the real world.
Paradoxically perhaps… the moment a photographer thinks he is showing us reality is the moment when it is most distant.
A.D. Coleman
[Critic and writer, b. 1943, New York, lives in New York.]
We’ve spent now about 150 years trying to convince ourselves that photographs are reliable evidence, some unimpeachable slice of the real world. That was a myth from the very beginning.
Justine Kurland
[Photographer, b. 1969, Warsaw, New York, lives mostly on the road.]
It seemed clear to me early on that one of the things a photograph could do was make a reality, and I wanted to do that. I always think of looking inside an Easter egg and seeing a perfect world.
Malick Sidibé
[Photographer, b. 1935, Soloba, Mali, d. 2016, Bamako, Mali.]
Photographs are reality: they never lie, and that’s important to me.
Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
How foolish of me to have believed that it would be that easy. I had confused the appearance of trees and automobiles and people with reality itself and believed that a photograph of these appearances to be a photograph of it. It is a melancholy truth that I will never be able to photograph it and can only fail. I am a reflection photographing other reflections within a reflection. To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.
Gerhard Richter
[Artist, b. 1932, Dresden, lives in Düsseldorf.]
I do not mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing, but I am suspicious regarding the image of reality which our senses convey to us, and which is incomplete and limited. Our eyes have developed such as to survive. It is merely coincidence that we can see stars with them, as well.
Alfred Stieglitz
[Photographer and curator, b. 1864, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1946, New York.]
In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.
