El Lissitzky (Eleazar Markovich Lisitskii)
[Artist, b. 1890, Vitebsk, Russia, d. 1941, Schodnia, Soviet Union.]
Art can no longer be merely a mirror, it must act as the organizer of the people’s consciousness... No form of representation is so readily comprehensible to the masses as photography.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau
[Writer and theorist, b. 1947, New York, lives in Santa Barbara, California.]
“The thing itself” is never just out there in the world waiting to be framed by the photographer’s Leica; rather, it is something dynamically produced in the act of representation and reception and already subject to the grids of meaning imposed on it by culture, history, language, and so forth.
Alexander Gardner
[Photographer, b. 1821, Paisley, Scotland, d. 1882, Washington, D.C.]
Verbal representations of such places or scenes may, or may not, have the merit of accuracy; but photographic presentments of them will be accepted by posterity with an undoubting faith.
Patti Smith
[Musician, artist, and writer, b. 1946, Chicago, Illinois, lives in Detroit and New York.]
I love to photograph the tools of one’s trade: Duncan Grant’s paintbrushes, the typewriter of Herman Hesse, or even my own guitar, a 1957 Fender Duo-Sonic.
Emmet Gowin
[Photographer, b. 1941, Danville, Virginia, lives in Princeton, New Jersey.]
Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn’t attending to. My photographs are intended to represent something you don’t see.
Frederick Wiseman
[Filmmaker and Documentarian, b. 1930, Boston, Massachusetts, lives in Boston.]
The effort to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality.
Guy Debord
[Writer and theorist, b. 1931, Paris, d. 1994, Champot, Upper Loire, France.]
In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.
David Levi Strauss
[Writer and critic, b. 1953, Junction City, Kansas, lives in New York.]
It’s not that we mistake photographs for reality; we prefer them to reality.
