Werner Bischof
[Photographer, b. 1916, Zürich, Switzerland, d. 1954, Peña de Aguila, Peru.]
I am powerless against the great magazines—I am an artist, and I will always be that.
Adam Fuss
[Photographer, b. 1961, London, lives in New York.]
We’re so conditioned to the syntax of the camera that we don’t realize that we are running on only half the visual alphabet... It’s what we see every day in the magazines, on billboards and even on television. All those images are being produced basically the same way, through a lens and a camera. I’m saying there are many, many other ways to produce photographic imagery, and I would imagine that a lot of them have yet to be explored.
Gilles Deleuze
[Writer and philosopher, b. 1925, Paris, d. 1995, Paris.]
Images exist; things themselves are images... Images constantly act on and react to one another, produce and consume. There is no difference between images, things and movement...
Victor Burgin
[Artist and writer, b. 1941, Sheffield, England, lives in London.]
It is almost as unusual to pass a day without seeing a photograph as it is to miss seeing writing.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.
Lucy Lippard
[Critic and writer, b. 1936, New York, lives in Galisteo, New Mexico.]
Photographers find themselves directly in competition with mass media’s misrepresentations of women. So the photographic terrain is particularly contested from a political point of view.
Lord Snowdon (Antony Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones)
[Earl and photographer, b. 1930, London, England, d. 2017, London.]
I’m very much against photographs being framed and treated with reverence and signed and sold as works of art. They aren’t. They should be seen in a magazine or a book and then be used to wrap up the fish and chucked away.
Bertolt Brecht
[Dramatist, director and poet, b. 1898, Augsburg, Germany, d. 1956, East Berlin.]
The tremendous development of photojournalism has contributed practically nothing to the revelation of the truth about the conditions in this world. On the contrary, photography, in the hands of the bourgeoisie, has become a terrible weapon against the truth. The vast amount of pictured material that is being disgorged daily by the press and that seems to have the character of truth serves in reality only to obscure the facts. The camera is just as capable of lying as the typewriter.
(1931)
