Denis Donoghue
[Critic, b. 1928, Tullow, County Carlow, Ireland, lives in New York.]
The camera has an interest in turning history into spectacle, but none in reversing the process. At best, the picture leaves a vague blur in the observer’s mind; strong enough to send him into battle perhaps, but not to have him understand why he is going.
Don DeLillo
[Writer, b. 1936, New York, lives in New York.]
All the impulses of the media were fed into the circuitry of my dreams. One thinks of echoes. One thinks of an image made in the image and likeness of images. It was that complex.
John Divola
[Photographer, b. 1949, Los Angeles, lives in Los Angeles.]
I don’t look for things to see how they function as metaphors.... You can’t photograph the sublime. You can only traffic in the specific and its relationship to the symbolic.
Georges Didi-Huberman
[Writer and thinker, b. 1953, Saint-Etienne, France, lives in Paris.]
Photography works hand in glove with image and memory and therefore possesses their notable epidemic power.
Thomas Demand
[Photographer, b. 1964, Munich, Germany, lives in Los Angeles.]
…the chances of making it as an artist are so small, I’d advise anyone to do something they are really passionate about, rather than speculating about what other people might be interested in. That way, if you don’t make it, which is quite likely, you at least know you were working on something that meant something to you.
Bruce Davidson
[Photographer, b. 1933, Oak Park, Illinois, lives in New York.]
All my photographs are portraits—self-portraits, because you can’t photograph someone without reflecting/echoing, like a bat sending out a signal that comes back to you. You get not only a picture of who you’re photographing, but you get a picture of yourself at the same time.
Louise Georgina Daguerre (né Arrowsmith)
[Wife of Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, b. 1810, d. 1857.]
He is always at thought; he cannot sleep at night for it. I am afraid he is out of his mind; do you, as a man of science, think it can every be done, or is he mad?
(1827, to chemist J.B. Dumas on her husband’s efforts to invent photography.)
Arthur Conan Doyle
[Writer, b. 1859, Edinburgh, Scotland, d. 1930, Crowborough, East Sussex, England.]
... I followed up the lectures by two exhibitions of psychic pictures and photographs upon a screen. It was certainly an amazing experience for those who imagined that the whole subject was dreamland, and they freely admitted that it staggered them.