Malick Sidibé
[Photographer, b. 1935, Soloba, Mali, d. 2016, Bamako, Mali.]
Photographs are reality: they never lie, and that’s important to me.
Eleanor Antin
[Artist, b. 1935, New York, lives in San Diego, California.]
I adore [photography’s] uneasy mix of fact and fiction—its dubious claim to truth—its status as history.
Robert Capa (Endre Ern? Friedmann)
[Photographer, b. 1913, Budapest, Hungary, d. 1954, Thai Binh, Vietnam.]
You don’t have to pose your camera. The pictures are there, and you just take them. The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda.
(On the Spanish Civil War, 1937)
Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
I used to have this notion when I was a kid that the minute you said anything, it was no longer true. Of course it would have driven me crazy very rapidly if I hadn’t dropped it, but there’s something similar in what I’m trying to say. That once it’s been done, you want to go someplace else.
Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen)
[Performance artist, b. 1943, Solingen, Germany, lives in Amsterdam.]
I didn’t care about the light conditions or formal aspects. I was never busy with the truth; I was always busy with reality. It is a big difference.
Martha Rosler
[Artist, b. 1943, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New York.]
The question at hand is the danger posed to
truth by computer-manipulated photographic imagery. How do we approach this question in a period in which the veracity of even the
straight, unmanipulated photograph has been under attack for a couple of decades.
Martine Franck
[Photographer, b. 1938, Antwerp, Belgium, d. 2012, Paris.]
A photograph is not necessarily a lie, but it isn’t the truth either. It’s more like a fleeting, subjective impression.
Leon Golub
[Artist, b. 1922, Chicago, Illinois, d. 2004, New York.]
People say: “But photographs are all lies.” That’s not the point. The lie is a truth, too. How the hell are we going to know what Kissinger looks like? Well, the photograph tells us one version; I’m trying to tell it also, but differently.
