Graciela Iturbide
[Photographer, b. 1942, Mexico City, lives in Coyoacán, Mexico.]
Without the camera you see the world one way, with it, you see the world another way. Through the lens you are composing, dreaming even, with that reality, as if through the camera you are synthesizing who you are... So you make your own image, interpreting.
Julio Cortázar
[Writer, b. 1914, Brussels, Belgium, d. 1984, Paris, France.]
... remembering, that gloomy operation of comparing the memory with the gone reality; a frozen memory, like any photo, where nothing is missing, not even, and especially, nothingness, the true solidifier of the scene.
Marius de Zayas
[Artist, b. 1880, Veracruz, Mexico, d. 1961, Greenwich, Connecticut.]
The photographer—the true photographer—is he who has become able, through a state of perfect consciousness, to possess such a clear view of things as to enable him to understand and feel the beauty of the reality of Form.
(1913)
Sebastião Salgado
[Photographer, b. 1944, Aimores, Minas Gerias, Brazil, lives in Paris and Brazil.]
You need to be accepted by reality.
Arthur Rothstein
[Writer, b. 1915, New York, d. 1985, New Rochelle, New York.]
It is sometimes desirable to distort or accentuate with lenses of various focal lengths... Deliberate distortion may actually add to its reality.
John Szarkowski
[Curator, critic, historian, and photographer, b. 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, d. 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]
An artist is a man who seeks new structures in which to order and simplify his sense of the reality of life. For the artist photographer, much of his sense of reality (where the pictures start) and much of his sense of craft (where the picture is completed) are anonymous and untraceable gifts from photography itself.
Jonathan Green
[Writer, photographer, and curator, b. 1939, lives in Riverside, California.]
The camera cannot lie, neither can it tell the truth. It can only transform. The very nature of the medium forces a disjuncture between the photograph and the world, yet the habits of perception—our everyday use of photography—forces us to see the image as surrogate reality.
Clarence John Laughlin
[Photographer, b. 1905, Lake Charles, Louisiana, d. 1985, New Orleans, Louisiana.]
... I frequently attempt to show in my work, in various ways, the unreality of the “real” and the reality of the “unreal.” This may result, at times, in some disturbing effects. But art
should be disturbing; it should make us both think
and feel; it should infect the subconscious as well as the conscious mind; it should never allow complacency nor condone the
status quo.
