Paul Valéry
[Writer and poet, b. 1871, Sète, France, d. 1945, Paris.]
Thanks to photography, the eye grew accustomed to anticipate what it should see and to see it; and it learned not to see nonexistent things which, hitherto, it had seen so clearly.
Pedro Meyer
[Photographer, b. 1935, Madrid, Spain, lives in Mexico City.]
The notion of the real and the fake has come full circle. We now tend to dismiss the real because it looks like a fake. The “truth” is that in their own way, when all is said and done, all fakes and surrogates also become their own sort of original.
Ed Ruscha
[Artist, b. 1937, Omaha, Nebraska, lives in Los Angeles.]
My pictures are not that interesting, nor the subject matter. They are simply a collection of “facts;” my book is more like a collection of “Ready-mades.”
Vik Muniz
[Artist, b. 1961, Sao Paulo, Brazil, lives in New York.]
Illusions as bad as mine make people aware of the fallacies of visual information and the pleasure to be derived from such fallacies.
Robert Frank
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1924, Zürich, Switzerland, lives in Mabou, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, and New York.]
I’m always looking outside, trying to look inside. Trying to say something that is true. But maybe nothing is really true. Except what’s out there. And what’s out there is always changing.
Philip Jones Griffiths
[Photojournalist, b. 1936, Rhuddian, Wales, d. 2008, London.]
I believe photography owes its status to achieving what no other medium can, capturing the reality of the defining moments of human existence as decisively as possible.
Allan Sekula
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1951, Erie, Pennsylvania, d. 2013, Los Angeles.]
The only “objective” truth that photographs offer is the assertion that somebody or something... was somewhere and took a picture. Everything else, everything beyond the imprinting of a trace, is up for grabs.
Lev Manovich
[Artist, theorist, and critic, b. 1960, Moscow, lives in New York.]
... the reason we think that computer graphics technology has succeeded in faking reality is that we, over the course of the last hundred and fifty years, have come to accept the image of photography and film as reality.
