Lucas Samaras
[Artist, b. 1936, Kastoria, Greece, lives in New York.]
The selfie era offers a big opening: everybody can do it; nowadays even five-year-olds know how to take a nude self-portrait.
Friedrich Nietzsche
[Philosopher, b. 1844, Rocken, Prussia, d. 1900, Weimar, Germany.]
We operate with nothing but things which do not exist, with lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time, divisible space—how should explanation even be possible when we first make everything into an image, into our own image!
Bruce Gilden
[Photographer, b. 1946, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New York.]
I’m photographing myself out there. Not myself physically, but mentally. It’s my take on the world.
Adam Gopnik
[Writer and critic, b. 1956, Philadelphia, lives in New York.]
Is the selfie—those newly omnipresent photos of ourselves, taken with our own little palm-fitting cameras—merely a genre of informal self-portraiture, as old as the camera and as many-sided, or is it visual crabgrass, covering over and crowding out deeper investigation of who we are?
Mario Giacomelli
[Photographer, b. 1925, Senigallia, Italy, d. 2000, Senigallia.]
What I was trying to show, rather than what I saw, was what was within me: my fear of getting old—not of dying—and my disgust at the price one has to pay for one’s life.
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…
Arnulf Rainer
[Artist, b. 1929, Baden, Austria, lives in Enzenkirchen, Austria.]
In 1968 I frequently would sit in a photo booth and practice self mirror images which I then documented photographically. Curious types would always open the curtains and chase me away. Today I work with a photographer.
Paolo Pellegrin
[Photographer, b. 1964, Rome, lives in Paris.]
I believe photography – like many other things one does in life – is the exact expression of who you are at a given moment.
