Wim Wenders
[Artist and filmmaker, b. 1945, Düsseldorf, lives in Berlin.]
If anything, I see myself as a “witness.” I’d also be pleased, if you’d call me an “interpreter.” I try to hear and see the message of a place and pass it on, into that other language, the universal one of images.
Rineke Dijkstra
[Photographer, b. 1959, Sittard, The Netherlands, lives in Amsterdam.]
I felt that the beach portraits were all self-portraits. That moment of unease, that attempt to find a pose, it was all about me.
Mario Giacomelli
[Photographer, b. 1925, Senigallia, Italy, d. 2000, Senigallia.]
[My mother] died a few months ago, and when she was dead I kissed her lips. For me it was a beautiful moment. From then on I started living with her, asking her from time to time if she was alright, if she was pleased with me. But these things are far greater than photography, and I probably shouldn’t be speaking about them.
Christian Metz
[Writer and film theorist, b. 1931, Béziers, France, lives in France.]
Photography is linked with death in many different ways. The most immediate and explicit is the social practice of keeping photographs in memory of loved beings who are no longer alive. But there is another real death which each of us undergoes every day, as each day we draw nearer to our own death. Even when the person photographed is still living, that moment when she or he was has forever vanished.
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.
Joan Didion
[Writer, b. 1934, Sacramento, California, lives in New York.]
For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.”
Joseph Kosuth
[Artist and theorist, b. 1945, Toledo, Ohio, lives in New York and Rome.]
That celebrated marriage of science and art, photography, seemed at the time to join together how we look at the world, art, with how we were coming to know it, science.
Michelangelo Antonioni
[Filmmaker, b. 1912, Ferrara, Italy, d. 2007, Rome.]
We know that under the revealed image there is another one which is more faithful to reality, and under this one is yet another, and again another under this last one, down to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that nobody will ever see. Or perhaps, not until the decomposition of every image, of every reality.
