Régis Durand
[Critic, writer, and curator, lives in Paris.]
Why is it that so many photographers today are driven to catalogue the traces or signs of what is supposed to appear or happen in the world? How can we explain this mania for the real, for things that, after all, simply exist?
Daido Moriyama
[Photographer, b. 1938, Ikeda-cho, Osaka, Japan, lives in Tokyo.]
For me, photography is not the endeavor to create a two-dimensional work of art, but by taking photo after photo, I come closer to truth and reality at the very intersection of the fragmentary nature of the world and my own personal sense of time.
Inez Van Lamsweerde
[Photographer, b. 1963, Amsterdam, Netherlands, lives in Amsterdam.]
My works have nothing to do with reality. I am not interested in a version of daily reality. The works show a new mental world.
Marc Riboud
[Photographer, b. 1923, St.-Genis-Laval, France, d. 2016, Paris.]
The target of our line of sight is reality, but our framing can transform it into a dream.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
[Poet, novelist, playwright, and natural philosopher, b. 1749, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, d. 1832, Weimar, Germany.]
Few people have the imagination for reality.
Helen Levitt
[Photographer, b. 1918, New York, d. 2009, New York.]
All I can say about the work I try to do, is that the aesthetic is in reality itself.
Richard Avedon
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 2004, San Antonio, Texas.]
The photographs have a reality for me that the people don’t. It’s through the photographs that I know them. Maybe it’s in the nature of being a photographer. I’m really never implicated. I don’t have any real knowledge.
Alfredo Jarr
[Artist, b. 1956, Santiago, Chile, lives in New York.]
For me, what was important was to record everything I saw around me, and to do this as methodically as possible. In these circumstances a “good photograph” is a picture that comes as close as possible to reality. But the camera never manages to record what your eyes see, or what you feel at the moment. The camera always creates a new reality.
