Lev Manovich
[Artist, theorist, and critic, b. 1960, Moscow, lives in New York.]
Once we came to accept the photographic image as reality, the way to its future simulation was open.
Andy Warhol
[Artist, b. 1928, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, d. 1987, New York.]
[My vision of America is] a good vision. Actually the best is on TV. I wanted to shoot all the pictures off the TV. No one would have known the difference.
Herbert Bayer
[Artist, graphic designer, theoretician, b. 1900, Haag, Austria, d. 1985, Montecito, California.]
The picture is the imitation and converted reality of the goods, in short, an indirect substitute for reality.
Edward Steichen
[Photographer and curator, b. 1879, Luxembourg, Germany, d. 1973, West Redding, Connecticut.]
Every photograph is a fake from start to finish.
Jean Baudrillard
[Writer and theorist, b. 1929, Reims, France, d. 2007, Paris.]
…the photograph that has become digital [is] liberated at a single stroke from both the negative and the real world.
Pedro Meyer
[Photographer, b. 1935, Madrid, Spain, lives in Mexico City.]
The notion of the real and the fake has come full circle. We now tend to dismiss the real because it looks like a fake. The “truth” is that in their own way, when all is said and done, all fakes and surrogates also become their own sort of original.
Man Ray (Emanuel Radnitsky)
[Artist, b. 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1976, Paris.]
An original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an original is motivated by necessity. It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms. To create is divine, to reproduce is human.
Jean Baudrillard
[Writer and theorist, b. 1929, Reims, France, d. 2007, Paris.]
... the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials—worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs, a more ductile material than meaning... It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself.
