Lev Manovich
[Artist, theorist, and critic, b. 1960, Moscow, lives in New York.]
... what is faked [by the computerization of image-making], of course, is not reality, but photographic reality, reality as seen by the camera lens. In other words, what computer graphics have (almost) achieved is not realism, but rather only
photorealism—the ability to fake not our perceptual and bodily experience of reality but only its photographic image.
Jason Salavon
[Artist, b. 1970, Indianapolis, Indiana, lives in Chicago.]
It’s dense out there. It’s a world of massively interconnected networks, a world of traffic jams and paper trails. A world teeming with life and movement. A place of information and data. My work and the software I write for it investigates the manipulation, reorganization, and/or generation of immense data sets common to American life.
Martin Parr
[Photographer, b. 1952, Epson, Surrey, England, lives in Bristol and London, England.]
When I first started learning how to take photographs, you had to spend the first six months figuring out what an f-stop was. Now you just go and take pictures. Nobody thinks about technical issues anymore because cameras or camera phones take care of that automatically.
Loretta Lux
[Photographer, b. 1969, Dresden, Germany, lives in Dublin, Ireland.]
The images are compositions of photos superimposed over painted backgrounds, then finished off with digital alterations.
Pedro Meyer
[Photographer, b. 1935, Madrid, Spain, lives in Mexico City.]
Before, the myth of “photography doesn’t lie” was used in order to cover up tricks. If I [make a] portrait [of] you, accommodate you, illuminate you, put make up on you or use a filter, am I not manipulating reality? The only difference is that now I can do it from the computer in the postclick instead of the preclick. If I decide to photograph something instead of something else, I also manipulate reality. Of course a photograph can lie or commit abuse, but it always could.
Anthony Aziz
The current excitement about the development of the technologies of communication seems to be coated in a blind faith in progress that is just as naïve as that which our predecessors put in nuclear power and the space age.
Camille Paglia
[Writer, b. 1947, Endicott, New York, lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.]
Computer enhancement has spread to still photography in advertisements, fashion pictorials, and magazine covers, where the human figure and face are subtly elongated or remodeled at will. Caricature is our ruling mode.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
[Photographer and painter, b. 1908, Chanteloup, France, d. 2004, Paris.]
Photography has not changed since its origin except in its technical aspects, which for me are not a major concern.
