John Tagg
[Writer, theorist, and photohistorian, b. 1949, North Shields, England, lives in Ithica, New York.]
The history of photography stands in relation to the history of Art as a history of writing would to the history of Literature.
Jacques Lacan
[Writer and psychoanalyst, b. 1901, Paris, France, d. 1981, Paris.]
The evil eye is the
fascinum, it is that which has the effect of arresting movement and, literally, of killing life. At the moment the subject stops, suspending his gesture, he is mortified. This anti-life, anti-movement function of the terminal point is the
fascinum, and it is precisely one of the dimensions in which the power of the gaze is exercised directly.
Shomei Tomatsu
[Photographer, b. 1930, Nagoya, Japan, d. 2012, Okinawa, Japan.]
In this, photography is the same thing as love. When my gaze, diving into the sea as my subject, converges with the act of photography, hot sparks fly at the point of intersection.
Edwin Land
[Inventor and entrepreneur, b. 1909, Bridgeport, Connecticut, d. 1991, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
The present is the past biting into the future.
Douglas McCulloh
[Photographer, b. 1959, Los Angeles, lives in Los Angeles.]
We live within an ever-deepening strata of visual iconography, sharing shifting signifiers up and down the layers of our lives. Eventually, we mistake abundance for vision. We become blind to our own blindness.
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
[Writer, b. 1835, Hannibal, Missouri, d. 1910, Redding, Connecticut.]
You can’t depend on your eyes if your imagination is out of focus.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
To take photographs means to recognize—simultaneously and within a fraction of a second—both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one’s head, one’s eye and one’s heart on the same axis.
Allan Sekula
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1951, Erie, Pennsylvania, d. 2013, Los Angeles.]
Just as money is the universal gauge of exchange value, uniting all the goods in a single system of transactions, so photographs are imagined to reduce all sights to relations of formal equivalence. Here, I think, lies one major aspect of the origins of the pervasive formalism that haunts the visual arts of the bourgeois epoch. Formalism collects all the world’s images in a single esthetic emporium, torn from all the contingencies of origin, meaning and use.
