Nan Goldin
[Photographer, b. 1953, Washington, D.C., lives in New York and Paris.]
When you set up pictures you’re not at any risk. Reality involves chance and risk and diving for pearls.
Tod Papageorge
[Photographer, b. 1940, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, lives in New Haven, Connecticut.]
...my argument against the set-up picture is that it leaves the matter of content to the
imagination of the photographer, a faculty that, in my experience, is generally deficient compared to the mad swirling possibilities that our dear common world kicks up at us on a regular basis.
Barbara Kasten
[Photographer, b. 1936, Chicago, Illinois, lives in Chicago.]
When I make a photograph, it’s not in the traditional style of using a camera to capture reality or to catch a fleeting moment of life. I use the camera to document a moment, but everything that it records is something that I’ve made with my hands.
Andreas Gursky
[Photographer, b. 1955, Leipzig, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf.]
Paradoxically, this view of the Rhine cannot be obtained
in situ; a fictitious construction was required to provide an accurate image of a modern river.
(On his photograph Rhein II
)
Philip Jones Griffiths
[Photojournalist, b. 1936, Rhuddian, Wales, d. 2008, London.]
...we are there with our cameras to record reality. Once we start modifying that which exists, we are robbing photography of its most valuable attribute.
Pedro Meyer
[Photographer, b. 1935, Madrid, Spain, lives in Mexico City.]
The notion of the real and the fake has come full circle. We now tend to dismiss the real because it looks like a fake. The “truth” is that in their own way, when all is said and done, all fakes and surrogates also become their own sort of original.
Douglas McCulloh
[Photographer, b. 1959, Los Angeles, lives in Los Angeles.]
If you scratch through the deceitful artifice of contemporary photography, you’ll find the real artifice underneath.
John Gossage
[Photographer, b. 1946, Staten Island, New York, lives in Washington D.C..]
You can do anything you like, it’s all fiction.
