John Berger
[Writer and critic, b. 1926, London, d. 2017, Paris.]
The private photograph is treated and valued today as if it were the materialization of that glimpse through the window which looked across history towards that which was outside time.
Clement Greenberg
[Critic, b. 1909, New York, d. 1994, New York.]
Photography is the only art that can still afford to be naturalistic and that, in fact, achieves its maximum effect through naturalism. Unlike painting or poetry, it can put all emphasis on an explicit subject, anecdote or message; the artist is permitted, in what is still so relatively mechanical and neutral a medium, to identify the “human interest” of his subject as he cannot in any of the other arts without falling into banality. Therefore it would seem that photography today could take over the field that used to belong to genre and historical painting, and that it does not have to follow painting into areas into which the latter has been driven by force of historical development.
Shimon Attie
[Photographer, b. 1957, Los Angeles, lives in New York.]
I use contemporary media to reanimate sites and places with images of their own lost histories.
Edward Curtis
[Photographer and ethnographer, b. 1868, Whitewater, Wisconsin, d. 1952, Los Angeles.]
The thought which this picture is meant to convey is that Indians as a race, already shorn of their tribal strength and stripped of their primitive dress, are passing into the darkness of an unknown future. Feeling that the picture expresses so much of the thought that inspired the entire work, the author has chosen it as the first of the series.
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Douglas McCulloh
[Photographer, b. 1959, Los Angeles, lives in Los Angeles.]
Time past cannot be stopped, saved, or regained. But a photograph allows you to borrow it.
Mark Klett
[Photographer, b. 1952, Albany, New York, lives in Tempe, Arizona.]
So much of what we know, and what we think we know, about the land has first passed through someone's lens. The interesting thing is to make use of this history, not merely to be absorbed into it. For me, landscape photographs begin as the artifacts of personal moments. They get interesting when they become cultural commentary.
Wang Qingsong
[Photographer, b. 1966, Jinzhou, Hubei Province, China, lives in Beijing.]
Applying documentary photography and parody and satire, I direct some familiar and typical scenes from our history. For me, art evolves from reality.
Allan Sekula
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1951, Erie, Pennsylvania, d. 2013, Los Angeles.]
How does photography serve to legitimate and normalize existing power relationships? ... How is historical and social memory preserved, transformed, restricted and obliterated by photographs?
