Andreas Gursky
[Photographer, b. 1955, Leipzig, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf.]

 [M]y pictures really are becoming increasingly formal and abstract. A visual structure appears to dominate the real events shown in my pictures. I subjugate the real situation to my artistic concept of the picture. (1998) 

Lev Manovich
[Artist, theorist, and critic, b. 1960, Moscow, lives in New York.]

 Straight photography has always represented just one tradition of photography; it always coexisted with equally popular traditions where a photographic image was openly manipulated and was read as such. Equally, there never existed a single dominant way of reading photography; depending on the context the viewer could (and continue to) read photographs as representations of concrete events, or as illustrations which do not claim to correspond to events which have occurred. Digital technology does not subvert “normal” photography because “normal” photography never existed. 

Victor Burgin
[Artist and writer, b. 1941, Sheffield, England, lives in London.]

 The electronic image fulfills the condition of what Baudrillard has termed “the simulacrum”—it is a copy of which there is no original. It is precisely in this characteristic of digital photography, I believe, that we must locate the fundamental significance of digital photography in Western history. 

Lev Manovich
[Artist, theorist, and critic, b. 1960, Moscow, lives in New York.]

 ... while in theory digital technology entails the flawless replication of data, its actual use in contemporary society is characterized by the loss of data, degradation, and noise; the noise which is even stronger than that of traditional photography. 
 As digital and network media rapidly become an omnipresent in our society, and as most artists come to routinely use these new media, the field is facing a danger of becoming a ghetto whose participants would be united by their fetishism of latest computer technology, rather than by any deeper conceptual, ideological or aesthetic issues—a kind of local club for photo enthusiasts. 

Philip Jones Griffiths
[Photojournalist, b. 1936, Rhuddian, Wales, d. 2008, London.]

 ... faking has enjoyed a quantum leap with the advent of computerized manipulation. Now, with digital cameras, there is no “original” to compare... Fraudulent practice is easy and detection difficult, and photography will never be the same again. 

Michael Light
[Photographer, b. 1963, Florida, lives in San Francisco.]

 Even in this age of digital manipulation, photographs continue to hold a huge degree of power and meaning. They’re beautiful and sad and complicated because every stoppage of time refers to the motion of time. 

Pedro Meyer
[Photographer, b. 1935, Madrid, Spain, lives in Mexico City.]

 Merging photographs can be more real than the isolated image because reality is so much more rich than just an isolated moment. 
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