Jim Goldberg
[Photographer, b. 1953, New Haven, Connecticut, lives in San Francisco.]
I have the great privilege of being both witness and storyteller. Intimacy, trust and intuition guide my work.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
Today, at the level of mass communications, it appears that the linguistic message is indeed present in every image: as title, caption, accompanying press article, film dialogue, comic strip balloon. Which shows it is not very accurate to talk of a civilization of the image—we are still, and more than ever, a civilization of writing, writing and speech continuing to be the full terms of the informational structure.
Donna Ferrato
[Photographer, b. 1949, Waltham, Massachusetts, lives in New York.]
What makes me really happy is to get deep into the muck and juicy good stuff of people’s lives.
Leonard Freed
[Photographer, b. 1929, Brooklyn, New York, d. 2006, Garrison, New York.]
Men die, heroically or fruitlessly, but man carries on. In Israel it is the same: the farmer must till the fields, the young must make love, and the photographer must, I suppose, be ready to photograph it all.
Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
Everything is subject for photography, especially the difficult things of our lives: anxiety, childhood hurts, lust, nightmares. The things that cannot be seen are the most significant. They cannot be photographed, only suggested.
Clarence John Laughlin
[Photographer, b. 1905, Lake Charles, Louisiana, d. 1985, New Orleans, Louisiana.]
As a whole, I am interested in the symbolic, rather than the literal use of the camera.
Annette Kuhn
[Writer and theorist, lives in Lancaster, England.]
Memories evoked by a photograph do not simply spring out of the image itself, but are generated in an intertext of discourses that shift between past and present, spectator and image, and between all these and cultural contexts, historical moments. In all this, the image figures largely as a trace, a clue: necessary, but not sufficient, to the activity of meaning-making; always signaling somewhere else.
Wim Wenders
[Artist and filmmaker, b. 1945, Düsseldorf, lives in Berlin.]
Images are no longer what they used to be. They can’t be trusted any more. We all know that. You know that. When we grew up, images were telling stories and showing them. Now they’re all into selling. They’ve changed under our very eyes. They don’t even know how to do it anymore. They’ve plain forgotten. Images are selling out the world. And at a big discount.
