Wright Morris
[Writer and photographer, b. 1910, Central City, Nebraska, d. 1998, Mill Valley, California.]
However much [photographs] may lie, they do so with the raw materials of truth.
Edmundo Desnoes
[Writer, b. 1930, Havana, Cuba, lives in New York.]
...photography can lie as convincingly as literature or painting. The angle, the selected content, the assumed context.
Eugène Delacroix
[Artist, b. 1798, Charenton-St.Maurice, France, d. 1863, Paris.]
[Photography is] in some ways false just because it is so exact.
Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don’t need Photoshop. You don’t need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don’t need a computer. All you need to do is
change the caption.
Pedro Meyer
[Photographer, b. 1935, Madrid, Spain, lives in Mexico City.]
Before, the myth of “photography doesn’t lie” was used in order to cover up tricks. If I [make a] portrait [of] you, accommodate you, illuminate you, put make up on you or use a filter, am I not manipulating reality? The only difference is that now I can do it from the computer in the postclick instead of the preclick. If I decide to photograph something instead of something else, I also manipulate reality. Of course a photograph can lie or commit abuse, but it always could.
Rineke Dijkstra
[Photographer, b. 1959, Sittard, The Netherlands, lives in Amsterdam.]
A photo is always a kind of lie. Truth is only present for a matter of a fraction of a second.
Joan Fontcuberta
[Photographer, b. 1955, Barcelona, lives in Barcelona.]
Every photograph is a fiction with pretensions to truth. Despite everything that we have been inculcated, all that we believe, photography always lies; it lies instinctively, lies because its nature does not allow it to do anything else.
Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Photographs attract false beliefs the way flypaper attracts flies.
