David Goldblatt
[Photographer, b. 1930, Randfontein, South Africa, d. 2018, Johannesburg.]
It was always possible for Joseph Stalin to remove Trotsky from a group photograph. Digital technology made it simpler, easier, faster...
A.D. Coleman
[Critic and writer, b. 1943, New York, lives in New York.]
What a photograph shows us is how a particular thing could be seen, or could be made to look—at a specific moment, in a specific context, by a specific photographer employing specific tools.
Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)
[Writer, b. 1885, Rungsted, Denmark, d. 1962, Rungsted, Denmark.]
Your own self, your personality and existence are reflected within the mind of each of the people whom you meet, ... into a likeness, a caricature of yourself, which still lives on and appears to be, in some way, the truth about you. Even a flattering picture is... a lie.
Roger Ballen
[Photographer, b. 1950, New York, lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.]
You can’t just set things up and photograph them and expect the picture to “zap.” It is very important that the mind feels that there is a moment of truth or a moment of authenticity. It’s really crucial, because if the artist’s hand is seen as too strong, the pictures seem either dead or contrived.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
Photography has something to do with resurrection... the survival of this image has depended on the luck of a picture made by a provincial photographer who, an indifferent mediator, himself long since dead, did not know that was he was making permanent was the truth—the truth to me.
Julia Margaret Cameron
[Photographer, b. 1815, Calcutta, India, d. 1879, Kalutara, Ceylon.]
My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the Real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and Beauty.
(1864)
August Sander
[Photographer, b. 1876, Herdorf, Germany, d. 1964, Cologne.]
From days of old, and in all periods, we find documents and books with pictures illustrating them, but photography has presented us with new possibilities and new tasks. It can depict things in magnificent beauty, but also in terrible truth, and can also deceive enormously. We must be able to bear seeing the truth, but above all we should hand down the truth to our fellow human beings and to posterity, be it favorable to us or unfavorable.
Giséle Freund
[Photographer, b. 1908, Berlin, Germany, d. 2000, Paris, France.]
...in the theatre the stage keeps the audience aware of the fictional nature of the action. The reader poring over a magazine, on the other hand, identifies what he sees in the photographs as real.
