Marshall McLuhan
[Writer and theorist, b. 1911, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, d. 1980, Toronto, Canada.]
...the logic of the photograph is neither verbal nor syntactical, a condition which renders literary culture quite helpless to cope with the photograph.
Rosalind Krauss
[Writer, critic, and historian, b. 1941, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]
By exposing the multiplicity, the facticity, the repetition and stereotype at the heart of every aesthetic gesture, photography deconstructs the possibility of differentiating between the original and the copy. [Photography calls] into question the whole concept of the uniqueness of the art object, the originality of the author, the coherence of the oeuvre within which it was made, and the individuality of so-called self-expression.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment... It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
The image freezes an endless number of possibilities; words determine a single certainty... this is why all news photographs are captioned.
Douglas Crimp
[Writer, theorist and critic, b. 1944, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, lives in Rochester, New York.]
If all aspects of the culture use this new operation [appropriation], then the operation itself cannot indicate a specific reflection on the culture.
Edmundo Desnoes
[Writer, b. 1930, Havana, Cuba, lives in New York.]
Photography has fooled the world. There’s no more convincing fraud. Its images are nothing but the expression of the invisible man working behind the camera. They are not reality, they form part of the language of culture.
