Christian Metz
[Writer and film theorist, b. 1931, Béziers, France, lives in France.]
The person who has been photographed, not the total person, is dead, dead for having been seen. 
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art. In other words, I am a strange action: I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture (comparable to certain nightmares). In terms of image-repertoire, the photograph (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter. Dennis Grady
[lives in South Pomfret, Vermont.]
Display of the captive before the camera lens, the condition Crazy Horse so ardently avoided, quickly became a ritual of power. The U.S. Cavalry photographically documented hundreds of captive Indians along their forced marches to penal colony reservations, and such images are commonplace in histories of the West. Philip Larkin
[Poet and writer, b. 1922, Coventry, England, d. 1985, London.]
It was your severed image that grew sweeter,That floated, wing-stiff, focused in the sun
Along uncertainty and gales of shame
Blown out before I slept. Now you are one
I dare not think alive: only a name
That chimes occasionally, as a belief
Long since embedded in the static past.
Margaret Atwood
[Writer, b. 1939, Ottawa, Canada, lives in Toronto.]
(The photograph was taken
the day after I drowned.
I am in the lake, in the center
of the picture, just under the surface.
It is difficult to say where
precisely, or to say
how large or how small I am:
the effect of water
on light is a distortion.
but if you look long enough
eventually
you will see me.) Jean Baudrillard
[Writer and theorist, b. 1929, Reims, France, d. 2007, Paris.]
Every photographed object is merely the trace left behind by the disappearance of all the rest. It is an almost perfect crime, an almost total resolution of the world, which merely leave the illusion of a particular object shining forth, the image of which then becomes an impenetrable enigma. Helmut Newton
[Photographer, b. 1920, Berlin, d. 2004, Los Angeles.]
Any photographer who says he’s not a voyeur is either stupid or a liar. Arnold Genthe
[Photographer, b. 1869, Berlin, Germany, d. 1942, New York.]
I was determined to show people a new kind of photography: there would be no stilted poses; as a matter of fact, no poses at all. I would try to take my sitters unawares, at a moment when they would not realize that the camera was ready. I would show them prints in which a uniform sharpness would be avoided and emphasis laid on portraying a person’s character instead of making a commonplace record of clothes and a photographic mask.