Wolfgang Tillmans
[Photographer, b. 1968, Remscheid, Germany, lives in London.]
I got rid of everything that’s artistic in portraiture: interesting lighting, recognizably “special” techniques, and all the different styles that divide us from the subject and are usually considered to be enhancements of the subject or the picture.
Andy Grundberg
[Critic, curator, and educator, lives in Washington, D.C.]
In the future, readers of newspapers and magazines will probably view news pictures more as illustrations than as reportage, since they can no longer distinguish between a genuine image and one that has been manipulated.
Robert Frank
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1924, Zürich, Switzerland, lives in Mabou, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, and New York.]
I think I always had a cold eye. I always saw things realistically. But, it’s also easier to show the darkness than the joy of life. Life is not beautiful all the time. Life can be good, then you lie down, and stare up at the ceiling, and the sadness falls on you. Things move on, time passes, people go away, and sometimes they don’t come back.
Philippe Halsman
[Photographer, b. 1906, Riga, Latvia, d. 1979, New York.]
Dali likes me taking his picture because he is interested in pictures that do not simply reproduce reality. Even in photos he prefers to appear outside reality.
Garry Winogrand
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, d. 1984, Tijuana, Mexico.]
A photograph can only look like how the camera saw what was photographed. Or, how the camera saw the piece of time and space is responsible for how the photograph looks. Therefore, a photograph can look any way. Or, there’s no way a photograph has to look (beyond being an illusion of a literal description).
Douglas Huebler
[Photographer and artist, b. 1924, Ann Arbor, Michigan, d. 1997, Truro, Massachusetts.]
The essential quality of existence concerns where one is at any instant in time: that locates everything else. Location, as a phenomenon of space and time, has been transposed by most art forms into manifestations of visual equivalence: that is, as an experience located at the ends of the eyeballs. I am interested in transposing location directly into “present” time by eliminating things, the appearance of things, and appearance itself. The documents carry out that role using language, photographs and systems in time and location.
Lucy Lippard
[Critic and writer, b. 1936, New York, lives in Galisteo, New Mexico.]
Despite having been awarded the dubious honor of arthood, all photography is still perceived as having one foot in the real world, a toe in the chilly waters of verisimilitude, no matter how often it is demonstrated that photographs can and do lie.
David Hockney
[Artist, b. 1937, Bradford, England, lives in Bridlington, Yorkshire; London; and Los Angeles.]
It’s not that I despised photography
ever, it’s just that I’ve always distrusted the claims that were made on its behalf—claims as to greater reality or authenticity.
