Ellen von Unwerth
[Photographer, b. 1954, Frankfurt, Germany, lives in New York.]
I like to photograph anyone before they know what their best angles are.
John Vachon
[Photographer, b. 1914, St. Paul, Minnesota, d. 1975, New York.]
One becomes keenly alive to the seeking of picture material. It becomes part of your existence to make a visual report on a particular place or environment.
Paul Virilio
[Writer and theorist, b. 1932, Paris, lives in La Rochelle, France.]
While the human gaze becomes more and more fixed, losing some of its natural speed and sensitivity, photographic shots, on the contrary, become even faster.
Carole Vance
[Anthropologist, lives in New York.]
Heirs to a Victorian cultural tradition that regarded sexual pleasure with profound suspicion, we greet explicit images of sexuality with anxiety and an undeveloped history of looking. Distinctions that viewers are accustomed to making—between fantasy and behavior, image and reality—become curiously evanescent when it comes to sex. Our unease increases if the sexual acts are unfamiliar or unconventional...
Paul Valéry
[Writer and poet, b. 1871, Sète, France, d. 1945, Paris.]
To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.
Édouard Vuillard
[Painter, b. 1868, Cuiseaux, Saône-et-Loire, France, d. 1940, La Baule, Loire-Atlantique, France.]
It is clear that the “Good” and the “Beautiful” have passed out of fashion—as the “True,” photography has shown us its nature and limitations: registering phenomena as a pure effect of their existence, requiring as
little man as possible.
(1896)
Dziga Vertov
[Artist and filmmaker, b. 1896, Bialystok, d. 1954, Moscow.]
I’m an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility... My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you.
(1923)
Bill Viola
[Artist, b. 1951, New York City, lives in Los Angeles.]
The electronic image is not fixed to any material base and, like our DNA, it has become a code that can circulate to any container that will hold it, defying death as it travels at the speed of light.
