William J. T. Mitchell
[Writer, theorist, and architect, b. 1944, Melbourne, Australia, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]

 Pictures of pain are not necessarily painful pictures, and this is why our response to them fluctuates between shame and delight, horror and pleasure. 

Man Ray (Emanuel Radnitsky)
[Artist, b. 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1976, Paris.]

 Cut out the eye from a photograph of one who has been loved but is seen no more.
Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and regulate the weight to suit the tempo desired.
Keep going to the limit of endurance.
With a hammer well-aimed, try to destroy the whole at a single blow.
(1932, describing “Object To Be Destroyed,” made using a metronome and the photographed eye of artist, lover and collaborator Lee Miller who left him.) 

James Agee
[Writer, b. 1909, Knoxville, Tennessee, d. 1955, New York.]

 Walker [Evans] setting up the terrible structure of the tripod crested by the black square heavy head, dangerous as that of a hunchback, of the camera; stooping beneath cloak and cloud of wicked cloth, and twisting buttons; a witchcraft preparing, colder than keenest ice, and incalculably cruel. (On Walker Evans photographing three tenant farmer families in Hale County, Alabama, 1936) 

Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]

 The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed. 

Pierre Klossowski
[Writer, artist, "but first, foremost, and always, a monomaniac", b. 1905, Paris, d. 2001, Paris.]

 The very idea of the nude is only a neutralization of a primitive and violent act. 

Edmundo Desnoes
[Writer, b. 1930, Havana, Cuba, lives in New York.]

 Photographs are detonators. They explode in us. We are the gaze as well as the gazed-at. The observer and the observed. 

Charles, Earl Spencer
[Secondary royalty, b. 1964, Althorp, Northamptonshire, England, lives in Althorp.]

 It would appear that every proprietor and editor of every publication that has paid for intrusive and exploitative photographs of her, encouraging greedy and ruthless individuals to risk everything in pursuit of Diana’s image, has blood on his hands today. (On the paparazzi role in the car crash death of his sister, Lady Diana) 

Martha Rosler
[Artist, b. 1943, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New York.]

 Women war photographers had to fight on two fronts: the bombs, and the men. 
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