Rudolf Arnheim
[Writer and psychologist, b. 1904, Berlin, Germany, d. 2007, Ann Arbor, Michigan.]
The fundamental peculiarity of the photographic medium; the physical objects themselves print their image by means of the optical and chemical action of light.
Wright Morris
[Writer and photographer, b. 1910, Central City, Nebraska, d. 1998, Mill Valley, California.]
Let us imagine a tourist from Rome, on a conducted tour of the provinces, who takes a snapshot of the swarming unruly mob at Golgotha, where two thieves and a rabble rouser are nailed to crosses. The air is choked with dust and the smoke of campfires. Flames glint on the helmets and spears of the soldiers. The effect is dramatic, one that a photographer would hate to miss. The light is bad, the foreground is blurred, and too much is made of the tilted crosses, but time has been arrested, and an image recorded, that might have diverted the fiction of history. What we all want is a piece of the cross, if there was such a cross. However faded and disfigured, this moment of arrested time authenticates, for us, time’s existence. Not the ruin of time, nor the crowded tombs of time, but the eternal present in time’s every moment. From this continuous film of time the camera snips the living tissue. So that’s how it was. Along with the distortions, the illusions, the lies, a specimen of the truth.
Christian Metz
[Writer and film theorist, b. 1931, Béziers, France, lives in France.]
Photography is the mirror, more faithful than any actual mirror, in which we witness at every age, our own aging. The actual mirror accompanies us through time, thoughtfully and treacherously; it changes with us, so that we appear not to change.
Henry Peach Robinson
[Photographer, b. 1830, Ludlow, Shropshire, England, d. 1901, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England.]
The photographer must not let his invention tempt him to represent, by any trick, any scene that does not occur in nature; if he does, he does violence to his art, because it is known that his finished result represents some object or thing that has existed for a space of time before his camera.
Andy Grundberg
[Critic, curator, and educator, lives in Washington, D.C.]
Modernism required that photography cultivate the photographic—indeed, that it invent the photographic—so that its legitimacy would not be questioned.
Frederick Sommer
[Photographer, b. 1905, Angri, Italy, d. 1999, Prescott, Arizona.]
Art and accident are one. Art accepts what it finds.
Jo Spence
[Artist, photographer, and writer, b. 1934, London, d. 1992, London.]
The one bright spot in this depression was the arrival of the pictures I had taken of my hospital experience... I was absolutely staggered at what I’d photographed. I couldn’t believe that I had seen so much and already forgotten it. I had already disavowed what had happened to me. But here were the photographs that my guardian self had taken—so much detail. This points up one of the advantages of photographing one’s traumas—before they become sealed over.
Henry Peach Robinson
[Photographer, b. 1830, Ludlow, Shropshire, England, d. 1901, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England.]
It must be confessed that it takes considerable skill to produce the best kind of lies. It is in the hands of first-class photographers only—and perhaps the indifferent ones—that photography can lie.
