Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
All alone—shorn of context, without captions—a photograph is neither true nor false…. For truth, properly considered, is about the relationship between language and the world, not about photographs and the world.
Laurie Simmons
[Photographer, b. 1949, Long Island, New York, lives in New York.]
People are much more willing nowadays to believe that pictures lie than [that] they can express any kind of truth.
David Levi Strauss
[Writer and critic, b. 1953, Junction City, Kansas, lives in New York.]
Photographs by themselves certainly cannot tell ‘the whole truth’—they are only instants.
Nick Knight
[Photographer, b. 1958, London, England, lives in London.]
I think photography has been wrestling with a burden of telling the truth, which I don’t think it was ever particularly good at.
Michelangelo Antonioni
[Filmmaker, b. 1912, Ferrara, Italy, d. 2007, Rome.]
We know that under the revealed image there is another one which is more faithful to reality, and under this one is yet another, and again another under this last one, down to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that nobody will ever see. Or perhaps, not until the decomposition of every image, of every reality.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
The history of photography could be recapitulated as the struggle between two different imperatives: beautification,... and truth-telling.
Alfred Stieglitz
[Photographer and curator, b. 1864, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1946, New York.]
I was born in Hoboken. I am an American. Photography is my passion. The search for Truth is my obsession.
(1921)
John Szarkowski
[Curator, critic, historian, and photographer, b. 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, d. 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]
A beginning photographer hopes to learn to use the medium to describe the truth. The intelligent journeyman has learned that there is not enough film to do that.
