John Loengard
[Photographer, editor, and critic, b. 1934, New York, lives in New York.]
Occasionally we are misled by photography, but generally we have good reason to believe it.
David Hockney
[Artist, b. 1937, Bradford, England, lives in Bridlington, Yorkshire; London; and Los Angeles.]
I can see it’s the end of chemical photography. We had this belief in photography, but that is about to disappear because of the computer. It can re-create something that looks like the photographs we’ve known. But it’s unreal. What’s that going to do to all photographs? Eh? It’s going to make people say: that’s not real—that’s just another invention… It’s like the ground being pulled from underneath us.
Philippe Halsman
[Photographer, b. 1906, Riga, Latvia, d. 1979, New York.]
When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping and the mask falls so that the real person appears.
Andreas Feininger
[Photographer, b. 1906, Paris, France, d. 1999, New York.]
Once a photographer is convinced that the camera can lie and that, strictly speaking, the vast majority of photographs are “camera lies,” inasmuch as they tell only part of a story or tell it in distorted form, half the battle is won. Once he has conceded that photography is not a naturalistic medium of rendition and that striving for “naturalism” in a photograph is futile, he can turn his attention to using a camera to make more effective pictures.
Victor Burgin
[Artist and writer, b. 1941, Sheffield, England, lives in London.]
The wholeness, coherence, identity, which we attribute to the depicted scene [in a photograph] is a projection, a refusal of an impoverished reality in favour of an imagined plenitude.
Margaret Mead
[Anthropologist, b. 1901, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1978, New York.]
Photographs [are] of course heavily dependent upon the culture, the disciplinary point of view and the idiosyncratic vision of the particular photographer-analyst.
John Berger
[Writer and critic, b. 1926, London, d. 2017, Paris.]
If the photograph isn’t “tricked” in one way or another, it is authentic like a trace of an event: the problem is that an event, when it is isolated from all the other events that come before it and which go after it, is in another sense not very authentic because it has been seized from that ongoing experience which is the true authenticity.
Andreas Gursky
[Photographer, b. 1955, Leipzig, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf.]
Any claims on the truth in my pictures are only to be answered in the sense that a particular event did in fact happen and did take place in the here and now.
