Nan Goldin
[Photographer, b. 1953, Washington, D.C., lives in New York and Paris.]
There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one to be invited to the party. But I’m not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my friends.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
[Writer and poet, b. 1929, Kaufbeuren, Germany, lives in Munich.]
The reality in which a camera turns up is always “posed,” e.g., the moon landing.
David LaChapelle
[Photographer, b. 1968, Connecticut, lives in New York.]
The two most ripped-off photographers in the past six years have been Nan Goldin and Larry Clark. These two artists took some harrowing pictures of themselves, their lovers, their fights. What some fashion photographers did was imitate these artists by getting some model and fucking up her hair and putting her in a Prada top and Gucci shoes and throwing her in a dirty apartment that’s not her own. They say these pictures are more modern and more real, but they’re fantasy presented as real. My work is fantasy presented as fantasy; I’m into escapism and beauty. I live on the Lower East Side, and once, I lived in a squat. I’ve had friends OD, so I don’t want to see someone looking strung out—I’ve been there.
Philippe Halsman
[Photographer, b. 1906, Riga, Latvia, d. 1979, New York.]
No photographer should be blamed when, instead of capturing reality, he tries to show things he has seen only in his imagination. Photography is the youngest art form. All attempts to enlarge its frontiers are important and should be encouraged.
Edward Weston
[Photographer, b. 1886, Highland Park, Illinois, d. 1958, Wildcat Hill, California.]
Photography is not at all seeing in the sense that the eyes see. Our vision is binocular, it is in a continuous state of flux, while the camera captures but a single isolated condition of the moment. Besides, we use lenses of various focal lengths to purposely exaggerate actual seeing, we “overcome” color for the same reason. In printing we carry on our willful distortion of fact. This is all legitimate procedure: but it is not seeing literally, it is seeing with intention, with reason.
Paul Valéry
[Writer and poet, b. 1871, Sète, France, d. 1945, Paris.]
The mere notion of photography, when we introduce it into our meditation on the genesis of historical knowledge and its true value, suggests the simple question: Could such and such a fact, as it is narrated here, have been photographed?
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.
Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]
Photography is new, I submit, because it is among the few arts that have, through the twentieth century, remained attentive to the facts of this world, to the actual appearance of the place that troubles us.
