Douglas Coupland
[Writer, b. 1961, Baden-Söllingen, Germany, lives in Vancouver, Canada.]
When you crop the photo, you tell a lie.
Katy Grannan
[Photographer, b. 1969, Arlington, Virginia, lives in Berkeley, California.]
…ultimately [my models’] desire to be seen and my desire to photograph them are the ingredients of something larger. The portrait that remains represents neither accurately. Our intentions, whatever they were, are recorded and warped and reinvented into something entirely unique. Every scar is beautiful, every smile disturbing and in that moment the portrait becomes its own truth.
Nobuyoshi Araki
[Photographer, b. 1940, Tokyo, lives in Tokyo.]
I am not saying these are true photographs because I shot my own honeymoon! It is simply that I have made love my starting point as a photographer, beginning by chance with an I-novel. Although in my case, I think everything will be an I-novel. This is because I think the I-novel is [the genre] closest to photography.
David Levi Strauss
[Writer and critic, b. 1953, Junction City, Kansas, lives in New York.]
One terrible truth about photographs is that they can only ever show us
what happened, never what is happening or will happen. They are always about something that is
gone, and so are in league with death.
William Mortensen
[Photographer and writer, b. 1897, Park City, Utah, d. 1965, Laguna Beach, California.]
If tone is granted to be subjected to control, why not line also, which has equal emotional significance? And if line, why not shapes and forms? And if shapes and forms, why not allow elision or emphasis of detail? And if all these things are allowed, what becomes of the “record of actuality”?... Sunk without a trace!
Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
When you see a picture, you don’t see outside the frame.
Janet Malcolm
[Writer, b. 1934, Prague, Czechoslovakia, lives in New York.]
If the “camera can’t lie,” neither is it inclined to tell the truth, since it can reflect only the usually ambiguous, and sometimes outright deceitful, surface of reality.
Marius de Zayas
[Artist, b. 1880, Veracruz, Mexico, d. 1961, Greenwich, Connecticut.]
Photography is not an Art. It is not even an art. Photography is the plastic verification of a fact... Art presents to us what we may call the emotions or intellectual truth; photography the material truth.
(1913)
