John Updike
[Writer, b. 1932, Shillington, Pennsylvania, d. 2009, Boston, Massachusetts.]
Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.
Barbara Kruger
[Artist, b. 1945, Newark, New Jersey, lives in New York.]
Is it possible to construct a way of looking which welcomes the presence of pleasure and escapes the deceptions of desire? How do we, as women and as artists, navigate through the marketplace that constructs and contains us? I see my work as a series of attempts to ruin certain representations and to welcome a female spectator into the audience of men.
Bernd Becher, Hilla Becher
[Photographer, b. 1931, Siegen, Germany, d. 2007, Rostock, Germany.]
[Photographer, b. 1934, Potsdam, d. 2015, Düsseldorf.]
We want to offer the audience a point of view, or rather a grammar, to understand and compare the different structures. Through photography, we try to arrange these shapes and render them comparable. To do so, the objects must be isolated from their context and freed from all association.
David Hockney
[Artist, b. 1937, Bradford, England, lives in Bridlington, Yorkshire; London; and Los Angeles.]
People feel that the world depicted through photography is absolutely real. But it’s not. That’s just an aspect of reality.
William Mortensen
[Photographer and writer, b. 1897, Park City, Utah, d. 1965, Laguna Beach, California.]
Thoughts and emotions cannot be photographed, despite the protestations of some mystically minded portraitists. Physical fact is ultimately the sole pictorial material.
Eleanor Antin
[Artist, b. 1935, New York, lives in San Diego, California.]
Science, Government, Education, Art, the cultural monolith may be said to exist primarily to exercise a paternal influence, decorously if possible, aggressively if necessary, to enforce certain accepted images upon individuals.
Annette Messager
[Artist, b. 1943, Berck-sur-Mer, France, lives in Paris.]
I never take a picture of a face because a face is somebody, an arm is not recognizable as somebody. When you take a photograph of someone’s face, it identifies it as somebody, but if you take just a fragment, it’s everybody. It’s not one person.
William Henry Fox Talbot
[Mathematician and pioneer of photography, b. 1800, Melbury, Dorset, England, d. 1877, Lacock Abbey, England.]
The plates of the present work are impressed by the agency of Light alone, without any aid whatsoever from the artists’ pencil.
(Epigraph, 1844, The Pencil of Nature,
the first photographic book)
