Arthur Tress
[Photographer, b. 1940, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Cambria, California.]
In my old age I no longer see the difference between documentary and staged.
(2012, age 71) 
Yukio Mishima
[Writer, b. 1925, Tokyo, d. 1970, Tokyo.]
This is a photograph, so it is as you see: there are no lies and no deceptions. One can detect here, elevated to an incomparably higher level, the same pathetic emotional appeal that lies concealed in every fake spiritualist photograph, every pornographic photograph; one comes to suspect that the strange, disturbing emotional appeal of the photographic art consists solely in that same repeated refrain: this is a true ghost... this is a photograph, so it is as you see: there are no lies, no deceptions.
Vik Muniz
[Artist, b. 1961, Sao Paulo, Brazil, lives in New York.]
As for Happenings, I have been to a few performances and I confess that I get embarrassed and rarely enjoy them. Photographs of such events, however, are always fascinating.
Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
They say seeing is believing, but the opposite is true. Believing is seeing.
Rosalind Krauss
[Writer, critic, and historian, b. 1941, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]
It is the order of the natural world that imprints itself on the photographic emulsion and subsequently on the photographic print. This quality of transfer or trace gives to the photograph its documentary status, it undeniable veracity. But at the same time this veracity is beyond the reach of those possible internal adjustments which are the necessary property of language. The connective tissue binding the objects contained by the photograph is that of the world itself, rather than that of a cultural system.
Andreas Feininger
[Photographer, b. 1906, Paris, France, d. 1999, New York.]
Once a photographer is convinced that the camera can lie and that, strictly speaking, the vast majority of photographs are “camera lies,” inasmuch as they tell only part of a story or tell it in distorted form, half the battle is won. Once he has conceded that photography is not a naturalistic medium of rendition and that striving for “naturalism” in a photograph is futile, he can turn his attention to using a camera to make more effective pictures.
David Hockney
[Artist, b. 1937, Bradford, England, lives in Bridlington, Yorkshire; London; and Los Angeles.]
I can see it’s the end of chemical photography. We had this belief in photography, but that is about to disappear because of the computer. It can re-create something that looks like the photographs we’ve known. But it’s unreal. What’s that going to do to all photographs? Eh? It’s going to make people say: that’s not real—that’s just another invention… It’s like the ground being pulled from underneath us.
Annie Leibovitz
[Photographer, b. 1949, Westbury, Connecticut, lives in New York.]
It’s like sitting in a room with ghosts. You go through your pictures and you think about what that shoot was like, who that person was, what that meant, that time in your own life.
