David Levi Strauss
[Writer and critic, b. 1953, Junction City, Kansas, lives in New York.]
Photographs by themselves certainly cannot tell ‘the whole truth’—they are only instants.
Joan Fontcuberta
[Photographer, b. 1955, Barcelona, lives in Barcelona.]
The heart [of my work], the quintessential, remains the questioning of photographic truth. Be careful, be critical, doubt, and filter the information you receive.
Edward Steichen
[Photographer and curator, b. 1879, Luxembourg, Germany, d. 1973, West Redding, Connecticut.]
Every photograph is a fake from start to finish.
Hiroshi Sugimoto
[Photographer, b. 1948, Tokyo, lives in New York.]
People have been reading photography as a true document, at the same time they are now getting suspicious. I am basically an honest person, so I let the camera capture whatever it captures... whether you believe it or not is up to you; it’s not my responsibility, blame my camera, not me.
Sarah Kember
[Writer and critic, lives in London.]
Computer manipulated and simulated imagery appears to threaten the truth status of photography even though that has already been undermined by decades of semiotic analysis. How can this be? How can we panic about the loss of the real when we know (tacitly or otherwise) that the real is always lost in the act of representation?
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
[Writer, b. 1835, Hannibal, Missouri, d. 1910, Redding, Connecticut.]
The sun never looks through a photographic instrument that does not print a lie. The piece of glass it prints is well named a “negative”—a contradiction—a misrepresentation—a falsehood. I speak feelingly of this matter, because by turns the instrument has represented me to be a lunatic, A Solomon, a missionary, a burglar and an abject idiot.
(1866)
Douglas Crimp
[Writer, theorist and critic, b. 1944, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, lives in Rochester, New York.]
The strategy of the [directorial] mode is to use the apparent veracity of photography against itself, creating one’s fictions through the appearance of a seamless reality into which has been woven a narrative dimension.
(1980)
Henry Adams
[Writer and historian, b. 1838, Boston, Massachusetts, d. 1918, Washington, D.C..]
I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.
