John Szarkowski
[Curator, critic, historian, and photographer, b. 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, d. 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]

 More convincingly than any other kind of picture, a photograph evokes the tangible presence of reality. It’s most fundamental use and its broadest acceptance has been as a substitute for the object itself—a simpler, more permanent, more clearly visible version of the plain fact. Our faith in the truth of a photograph rests on our belief that the lens in impartial, and will draw the subject as it is, neither nobler nor meaner. 

Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]

 The received wisdom is that Atget photographed Paris as though it were a crime scene. (Did he really? Yes, I believe so.) 

Pedro Meyer
[Photographer, b. 1935, Madrid, Spain, lives in Mexico City.]

 The photograph as an objective representation of reality simply does not exist. The photograph does not explain to you what is going on to the left or to the right or above or below the frame. Oftentimes, it doesn’t even explain to you what is going on inside the frame. 

David Levi Strauss
[Writer and critic, b. 1953, Junction City, Kansas, lives in New York.]

 It’s not that we mistake photographs for reality; we prefer them to reality. 

André Kertész
[Photographer, b. 1894, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1985, New York.]

 You do not have to imagine things; reality gives you all you need. 

Fred Ritchin
[Critic and writer, b. 1952, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]

 I always believed that photography was subjective, interpretive and certainly did not represent the “truth,” but I did think that its status as a societal and historical referent needed to be both safeguarded and illuminated....now photojournalism is devolving into yet another medium perceived as intending to shock, titillate, sell, distort. 

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
[Artist, photographer, designer, and teacher, b. 1895, Bacsbarsod, Hungary, d. 1946, Chicago, Illinois.]

 Everyone will be compelled to see that which is optically true, is explicable in its own terms, is objective, before he can arrive at any possible subjective position. This will abolish that pictorial and imaginative association pattern which has remained unsuperseded for centuries and which has been stamped upon our vision by great individual painters. 

Joseph Kosuth
[Artist and theorist, b. 1945, Toledo, Ohio, lives in New York and Rome.]

 Unlike the marks of a painting, the photo seems to organize its ‘opinions’ in relation to the world; even when the photographs have clearly been manipulated, the ‘opinions’ seem to have all the more force, with the suggested ‘participation of the world’ articulating that ‘opinion’ as a difference. 
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