Walter Benjamin
[Philosopher, critic, and theorist, b. 1892, Berlin, d. 1940, Port Bou, France.]
Just as lithography virtually implied the illustrated newspaper, so did photography foreshadow the sound film [because,] since the eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with speech.
Stan Brakhage
[Filmmaker, b. 1933, Kansas City, Missouri, d. 2003, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.]
I was struggling against the flypaper of other arts harnessing film to their own usages, which means essentially as a recording device or within the long historical trap of “picture”—by which I mean a collection of nameable shapes within a frame. I don’t even think still photography, with few exceptions, has made any significant attempt to free itself from that.
Louis Aragon
[Artist, poet, and writer, b. 1897, Neuilly, France, d. 1982, Paris.]
As we know, cubism was a reaction on the part of painters to the invention of photography. Photography and cinema made struggling for exact
likeness childish.
(1935)
Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
While one image may be more interesting or appealing than another, each photograph is of equal importance and requires the context of the entire body of work to make its meaning fully understood. Like scenes from a film, the individual photograph, when removed from the series, is a fragment.
Cindy Sherman
[Artist, b. 1954, Glen Ridge, New Jersey, lives in New York.]
To pick a character like that was about my own ambivalence about sexuality—growing up with the women role models that I had, and a lot of them in films, that were like that character, and yet you were supposed to be a good girl.
André Bazin
[Film critic and theorist, b. 1918, Angers, France, d. 1958, Nogent-sur-Marne, Île-de-France, France.]
The photographer proceeds, via the intermediary of the lens, to a point where he literally takes a luminous imprint, a cast... [But] the cinema realizes the paradox of moulding itself on the time of the object and of taking the imprint of its duration as well.
Loretta Lux
[Photographer, b. 1969, Dresden, Germany, lives in Dublin, Ireland.]
My pictures are not really about the children that I photograph. They’re more like actors in a film. I think you can always recognize the children, but they are alienated from their real appearance and become more like metaphors.
Christian Metz
[Writer and film theorist, b. 1931, Béziers, France, lives in France.]
The importance of immobility and silence to photographic
authority, the nonfilmic nature of this authority, leads me to some remarks on the relationship of photography with death. Immobility and silence are not only two objective aspects of death, they are also its main symbols, they
figure it.
