Gerhard Richter
[Artist, b. 1932, Dresden, lives in Düsseldorf.]
The photograph is the only picture that can truly convey information, even if it is technically faulty and the object can barely be identified. A painting of a murder is of no interest whatever; but a photograph of a murder fascinates everyone.
Eugène Atget
[Photographer, b. 1857, Paris, France, d. 1927, Paris.]
For more than twenty years by my own work and personal initiative, I have gathered from all the old streets of Vieux Paris photographic plates, 18 x 24 format, artistic documents of the beautiful civil architecture of the 16th to the 19th century: the old
hôtels, historic or curious houses, beautiful facades, beautiful doors, beautiful woodwork, door knockers, old fountains... This vast artistic and documentary collection is today complete. I can truthfully say that I possess all of Vieux Paris.
William Henry Fox Talbot
[Mathematician and pioneer of photography, b. 1800, Melbury, Dorset, England, d. 1877, Lacock Abbey, England.]
Having a paper to be read next week before the Royal Society, respecting a new Art of Design which I discovered about five years ago, viz. the possibility of fixing upon paper the image formed by a Camera Obscura, or rather, I should say, causing it
to fix itself…
Steve Edwards
[Writer and photohistorian, lives in London.]
If surface is all there is, if what you see is what you get, then any claim of a photographic dialogue with the world is an illusion. If meaning is constructed within the frame, photography turns out to be far more deluded than art.
August Sander
[Photographer, b. 1876, Herdorf, Germany, d. 1964, Cologne.]
No language on earth speaks as comprehensively as photography, always providing that we follow the chemical and optic and physical path to demonstrable truth, and understand physiognomy.
Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see.
Umberto Eco
[Writer, semiotician, and philosopher, b. 1932, Alessandria, Piedmont, Italy, d. 2016, Milan.]
If photography is to be likened to perception, this is not because the former is a “natural” process but because the latter is also coded.
James Agee
[Writer, b. 1909, Knoxville, Tennessee, d. 1955, New York.]
The camera is just a machine, which records with impressive and as a rule very cruel faithfulness.
