Thomas Demand
[Photographer, b. 1964, Munich, Germany, lives in Los Angeles.]
I think that nowadays there are more images in the world than world to be in the pictures.
Giséle Freund
[Photographer, b. 1908, Berlin, Germany, d. 2000, Paris, France.]
...in the theatre the stage keeps the audience aware of the fictional nature of the action. The reader poring over a magazine, on the other hand, identifies what he sees in the photographs as real.
R. Crumb
[Cartoonist, b. 1943, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, lives in Sauve, France.]
I couldn’t find any good pictures in magazines of ordinary modern street corners in America, so I persuaded this guy I knew in Sacramento — Stanley Something-or-other — to spend a day with me driving around just to take snapshots.
Walter Benjamin
[Philosopher, critic, and theorist, b. 1892, Berlin, d. 1940, Port Bou, France.]
Every day the urge grows stronger to get a hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction.
(1936)
Douglas Crimp
[Writer, theorist and critic, b. 1944, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, lives in Rochester, New York.]
The desire of representation exists only insofar as the original is always deferred. It is only in the absence of the original that representation can take place.
Alvin Langdon Coburn
[Photographer, b. 1882, Boston, Massachusetts, d. 1966, Wales.]
Why should not the camera throw off the shackles of conventional representation?
(1916)
Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
One of photography’s early attractions for me was that it was – or could be made to appear to be – almost the same as ordinary vision; or at least it was the closest thing to that the arts offered. It had the illusion of being unmediated seeing, and it was that quality that I wanted to exploit…
Marcel Duchamp
[Artist, b. 1887, Blainville, France, d. 1968, Neilly-sur-Seine, France.]
It’s the viewer that makes the work.
