Francis Galton
[Polymath, explorer, anthropologist, inventor, meteorologist, statistician, b. 1822, Birmingham, England, d. Haslemere, Surrey, England.]
The inferiority of photographs to the best works of artists, so far as resemblance is concerned, lies in their catching no more than a single expression. If many photographs of a person were taken at different times, perhaps even years apart, their composite would possess that in which a single photograph is deficient.
William Burroughs
[Writer, b. 1914, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1997, Lawrence, Kansas.]
Dead post card you got it? — Take it from noon refuse like ash — Hurry up See? These pictures are yourself…
Umberto Eco
[Writer, semiotician, and philosopher, b. 1932, Alessandria, Piedmont, Italy, d. 2016, Milan.]
We know that sensory phenomena are transcribed in the photographic emulsion in such a way that even if there is a causal link with the real phenomena, the graphic images can be considered as wholly arbitrary with respect to these phenomena.
Hippolyte Taine
[Art critic and historian, b. 1828, Vouziers, Ardennes, France, d. 1893, Paris.]
I wish to reproduce things as they are or as they would be even if I myself did not exist.
Eugène Delacroix
[Artist, b. 1798, Charenton-St.Maurice, France, d. 1863, Paris.]
[Photography is] in some ways false just because it is so exact.
Arnold Newman
[Photographer, b. 1918, New York, d. 2006, New York.]
It seems to me that no one picture can ever be a final summation of a personality. There are so many facets in every human being that it is impossible to present them all in one photograph.
Siegfried Kracauer
[Media critic and sociologist, b. 1889, Frankfurt, Germany, d. 1966, New York.]
The image wanders ghostlike through the present. Ghostly apparitions occur only in places where a terrible deed has been committed.
Richard Prince
[Artist, b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone, lives in New York.]
Is passion what we are? Is that what we are in pictures? Is what we are in pictures almost real? Maybe it’s become the “most” real thing.
