Taryn Simon
[Photographer, b. 1975, New York, lives in New York.]

 Simulations directly relate to the process of and complications in photography. They also overtly create layers of fantasies, myths and interventions... The simulation confuses the idea of a truth. I’ve always been interested in this kind of theater and illusion at the foundation of belief. 

John Berger
[Writer and critic, b. 1926, London, d. 2017, Paris.]

 A photograph is evidence of an encounter between event and photographer. A drawing slowly questions an event’s appearance and in doing so reminds us that appearances are always a construction with a history. 

Douglas Crimp
[Writer, theorist and critic, b. 1944, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, lives in Rochester, New York.]

 ...representation takes place because it is always already there in the world as representation. It was, of course, [Edward] Weston who said that the photograph must be visualized in full before the exposure is made... The a priori Weston had in mind was not really in his mind at all; it was in the world, and Weston only copied it. 

Barbara Kruger
[Artist, b. 1945, Newark, New Jersey, lives in New York.]

 Images are made palpable, ironed flat by technology and, in turn, dictate the seemingly real through the representative. 

Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon)
[Photographer, b. 1820, Paris, d. 1910, Paris.]

 But do not all these miracles [the steam engine, the electric light, the telephone, the phonograph, the radio, bacteriology, anesthesiology, psychophysiology] pale when compared to the most astonishing and disturbing one of all, that one which seems finally to endow man himself with the divine power of creation: the power to give physical form to the insubstantial image that vanishes as soon as it is perceived, leaving no shadow in the mirror, no ripple on the surface of the water? (1900) 

Sebastião Salgado
[Photographer, b. 1944, Aimores, Minas Gerias, Brazil, lives in Paris and Brazil.]

 Everything that happens in the world must be shown and people around the world must have an idea of what’s happening to the other people around the world. I believe this is the function of the vector that the documentary photographer must have, to show one person’s existence to another. 

Siegfried Kracauer
[Media critic and sociologist, b. 1889, Frankfurt, Germany, d. 1966, New York.]

 Never before has an age been so informed about itself, if being informed means having an image of objects that resembles them in a photographic sense. (1927) 

Geoffrey Batchen
[Photohistorian, b. 1956, Australia, lives in Wellington, New Zealand.]

 Human experience comes suspended in the sickly-sweet amniotic fluid of commercial photography. And a world normally animated by abrasive differences is blithely reduced to a single, homogeneous National Geographic way of seeing. 
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