Andy Grundberg
[Critic, curator, and educator, lives in Washington, D.C.]
Modernism required that photography cultivate the photographic—indeed, that it invent the photographic—so that its legitimacy would not be questioned.
James Casebere
[Photographer, b. 1953, Lansing, Michigan, lives in New York.]
The novels by Latin American magical realists showed how history is rewritten by each successive military dictatorship. I look at photography the same way: as a fiction, as representative of a particular point of view.
Frederick Sommer
[Photographer, b. 1905, Angri, Italy, d. 1999, Prescott, Arizona.]
The sensitized surface has an honesty, an inevitableness... It just can’t do anything else. It shows you the process itself.
George Bernard Shaw
[Writer, critic, and dramatist, b. 1856, Dublin, d. 1950, Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire, England.]
There is a terrible truthfulness about photography that sometimes makes a thing ridiculous... take the case of the ordinary academician. He gets hold of a pretty model, he puts a dress on her and he paints her as well as he can and calls her “Juliet,” and puts a nice verse from Shakespeare underneath, and puts the picture in the Gallery. It is admired beyond measure. The photographer finds the same pretty girl; he dresses her up and photographs her, and calls her “Juliet,” but somehow it is no good—it is still Miss Wilkins, the model. It is too true to be Juliet.
Eleanor Antin
[Artist, b. 1935, New York, lives in San Diego, California.]
Why should I be limited by my own biography?
Ken Domon
[Photographer, b. 1909, Sakata, Japan, d. 1990, Tokyo.]
The absolutely pure snapshot, absolutely unstaged.
(Dictum)
Zoe Leonard
[Artist and photographer, b. 1961, Liberty, New York, lives in New York.]
When people look at a photograph, they believe it… My photographs crawl along that edge. I document the world, but from my own biased point of view.
Giséle Freund
[Photographer, b. 1908, Berlin, Germany, d. 2000, Paris, France.]
...in the theatre the stage keeps the audience aware of the fictional nature of the action. The reader poring over a magazine, on the other hand, identifies what he sees in the photographs as real.
