A.D. Coleman
[Critic and writer, b. 1943, New York, lives in New York.]
It is no coincidence that one cardinal rule in brainwashing is to remove from the victim all photographs of himself and people he has known.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
[Physician, author, father of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, b. 1809, Cambridge, Massachusetts, d. 1894, Boston, Massachusetts.]
Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins and leave the carcasses as of little worth. The consequence of this will soon be such an enormous collection of forms that they will have to be classified and arranged in vast libraries, as books are now. The time will come when a man who wishes to see any object, natural or artificial, will go to the Imperial, National, or City Stereographic Library and call for its skin or form, as he would for a book at any common library.
(1859)
Annette Kuhn
[Writer and theorist, lives in Lancaster, England.]
A photograph can certainly throw you off the scent. You will get nowhere, for instance, by taking a magnifying glass to it to get a closer look: you will see only patches of light and dark, an unreadable mesh of grains. The image yields nothing to that sort of scrutiny; it simply disappears. In order to show what it is evidence of, a photograph must always point you away from itself.
Andy Grundberg
[Critic, curator, and educator, lives in Washington, D.C.]
In the future, readers of newspapers and magazines will probably view news pictures more as illustrations than as reportage, since they can no longer distinguish between a genuine image and one that has been manipulated.
Régis Durand
[Critic, writer, and curator, lives in Paris.]
... even in the absence of any concrete image, photography possesses a strong visual and mental existence. It gives an immediate memory to thought, including and perhaps especially in cases where a photo hasn’t been taken.
Lady Elizabeth Eastlake (Elizabeth Rigby)
[Writer and photographer, b. 1809, London, d. 1893, London.]
[Photography] is made for the present age, in which the desire for art resides in small minority, but the craving, or rather the necessity for cheap, prompt, and correct facts in the public at large. Photography is the purveyor of such knowledge to the world. She is the sworn witness of everything presented to her view.
(1857)
Claude Lanzmann
[Filmmaker, b. 1925, Paris, lives in Paris.]
I think that no one human being would have been able to look at [a hypothetical photographic record of the Nazi gassing of Jews]… I would have preferred to destroy it. It is not visible.
Walter Benjamin
[Philosopher, critic, and theorist, b. 1892, Berlin, d. 1940, Port Bou, France.]
Evidently, a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye—if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man.
