Louis Aragon
[Artist, poet, and writer, b. 1897, Neuilly, France, d. 1982, Paris.]
As we know, cubism was a reaction on the part of painters to the invention of photography. Photography and cinema made struggling for exact likeness childish.
(1935)
For each man there awaits... a particular image capable of annihilating the entire universe.
The painting of tomorrow will use the photographic eye as it has used the human eye.
As [John Heartfield] was playing with the fire of appearance, reality took fire around him... The scraps of photographs that he formerly manoeuvred for the pleasure of stupification, under his fingers began to signify.
Today crowds are returning to art by way of photography. With the passionate movements of children at play. With the poses of men caught unawares in their sleep. With the unconscious twitches of people strolling by.
(1936)
Photography intervenes in a very strange way. It makes the streets, gates, squares of the city into illustrations of a trashy novel, draws off the banal obviousness of this ancient architecture to inject it with the most pristine intensity...
In the last few years, the manufacture of cameras such as those of the newspaper photographers, the principle of which is very similar to that of cinema cameras, has brought about an absolutely new school of photography,... thanks to the technical perfection of the camera, photography in its turn has abandoned the studio and lost its static, academic character—its fixity. It has mixed into life; it has gone everywhere taking life by surprise: and once again it has become more revealing and more denunciatory than painting. It no longer shows us human beings posing, but men in movement... The photograph... today stops at nothing. It is discovering the world anew.
(1936)