Chris Burden
[Artist, b. 1946, Boston, Massachusetts, d. 2015, Los Angeles.]

 I was very careful not to use film or video to record most of the performances, because I think most people, then, were not sophisticated enough to look at a video or film and necessarily understand that they were not seeing the real thing, so there was a built-in misunderstanding and you could go away from the film with a misrepresentation. Still photographs have been around for longer so people understand that they’re only a symbol of what was there, they are more easily able to separate the stills from the reality of the actual event and see them only as symbols or indicators of what went on. 

Minor White
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1908, Minneapolis, Minnesota, d. 1976, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]

 A sequence of photographs is like a cinema of stills. The time and space between photographs is filled by the beholder, first of all from himself, then from what he can read in the implications of design, the suggestions springing from treatment, and any symbolism that might grow from within the subject itself. 

Oliviero Toscani
[Photography, b. 1942, Milan, Italy, lives in Casale Marittimo, Tuscany, Italy.]

 A photograph permits a first viewing, and then an individual reflection. It solicits participation, and encourages individuality in interpretation. Television is an autarchy, a dictatorship. 

Jeff Wall
[Photographer, b. 1946, Vancouver, Canada, lives in Vancouver.]

 My practice has been to reject the role of witness or journalist, of “photographer,” which in my view objectifies the subject of the picture by masking the impulses and feelings of the picture-maker. The poetics or the “productivity” of my work has been in the stagecraft and pictorial composition—what I call the cinematography. 

Kasmir Malevich
[Artist, b. 1878, Kiev, Russia, d. 1933, Leningrad (now St. Petersburg).]

 I regard photography and film simply as new technical means which painters must absolutely make use of, just as from time out of mind they have made use of brush, charcoal and color. It is certain, however, that photography and film must become as evocative for the sensibility as pencil, charcoal and brush. (1927) 

John Waters
[Filmmaker and photographer, b. 1946, Baltimore, Maryland, lives in Baltimore.]

 My photographs are not really about photography. They are about editing. I use photography but they are all taken from the TV screen. Anybody can do that, but it's the order I put the pictures in to try to create a new kind of movie, something that you can put on your wall. 

Michael Light
[Photographer, b. 1963, Florida, lives in San Francisco.]

 I struggle against photography. I struggle against the fact that it is silent, that it is just a piece of paper on the wall, often presented in a tedious white matt frame. 
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