Siegfried Kracauer
[Media critic and sociologist, b. 1889, Frankfurt, Germany, d. 1966, New York.]
The image wanders ghostlike through the present. Ghostly apparitions occur only in places where a terrible deed has been committed.
Thomas Ruff
[Photographer, b. 1958, Zell, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf, Germany.]
I received my training at an art academy, so what I produce is art. That’s what is artistic about my photographs.
Georges Didi-Huberman
[Writer and thinker, b. 1953, Saint-Etienne, France, lives in Paris.]
Does inadequacy not characterize all that we make use of to perceive and describe the world? Are the signs of language not just as “inadequate,” albeit differently, as are images?
Frederick Sommer
[Photographer, b. 1905, Angri, Italy, d. 1999, Prescott, Arizona.]
Life itself is not the reality. We are the ones who put life into stones and pebbles.
E. L. Doctorow
[Writer, b. 1931, New York, lives in New York.]
I worry about images. Images are what things mean.
Rosalind Krauss
[Writer, critic, and historian, b. 1941, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]
The frame announces that between the part of reality that was cut away and this part there is a difference; and that this segment which the frame frames is an example of nature-as-representation, nature-as-sign.
Richard Avedon
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 2004, San Antonio, Texas.]
A portrait isn’t a fact but an opinion—an occasion rather than a truth.
Joseph Kosuth
[Artist and theorist, b. 1945, Toledo, Ohio, lives in New York and Rome.]
Making “something new to look at” is a futile and empty act if its only audience is the eyes.
