Barbara Kruger
[Artist, b. 1945, Newark, New Jersey, lives in New York.]

 Is it possible to construct a way of looking which welcomes the presence of pleasure and escapes the deceptions of desire? How do we, as women and as artists, navigate through the marketplace that constructs and contains us? I see my work as a series of attempts to ruin certain representations and to welcome a female spectator into the audience of men. 

Walter Benjamin
[Philosopher, critic, and theorist, b. 1892, Berlin, d. 1940, Port Bou, France.]

 What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value. 

Allan Sekula
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1951, Erie, Pennsylvania, d. 2013, Los Angeles.]

 The making of a human likeness on film is a political act. 

Danny Lyon
[Photographer, b. 1942, New York, lives in Ulster County, New York.]

 [The people who run things] are so successful in the way they do it now. They could buy me off with a couple of vintage prints, they could have you do an ad, or give you a ribbon... In capitalist countries they reward artists because we’re ineffectual. 

George
[Artist, b. 1942, Devon, England, lives in London.]

 Our reason for making pictures is to change people and not to congratulate them on being how they are. 

Susie Linfield
[Writer and critic, New York, lives in New York.]

 Every image of barbarism—of immiseration, humiliation, terror, extermination—embraces its opposite, though sometimes unknowingly. Every image of suffering says not only, “This is so,” but also, by implication: “This must stop.” 

André Breton
[Artist, writer, editor, and critic, b. 1896, Tinchebray, France, d. 1966, Paris, France.]

 It is through the power of images that, in time, real revolutions may well be brought about. 

Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]

 A photograph can’t coerce. It won’t do the moral work for us. But it can start us on the way. 
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