David Hockney
[Artist, b. 1937, Bradford, England, lives in Bridlington, Yorkshire; London; and Los Angeles.]
All religions are about social control. The church, when it had social control, commissioned paintings, which were made using lenses and when it stopped commissioning images, its power declined, slowly. Social control today is in the media—and based on photography. The continuum is the mirrors and lenses.
Marshall McLuhan
[Writer and theorist, b. 1911, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, d. 1980, Toronto, Canada.]
Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.
Thomas Demand
[Photographer, b. 1964, Munich, Germany, lives in Los Angeles.]
I think that nowadays there are more images in the world than world to be in the pictures.
Paul Virilio
[Writer and theorist, b. 1932, Paris, lives in La Rochelle, France.]
In industrialized warfare, where the representation of events outstripped the presentation of facts, the image was starting to gain sway over the object, time over space. Soon a conflict of strategic and political interpretation would ensue, with radio and then radar completing the picture.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Nonstop imagery (television, streaming video, movies) is our surround, but when it comes to remembering, the photograph has the deeper bite. Memory freeze-frames; its basic unit is the single image.
Maurizio Cattelan
[Artist, b. 1960, Padova, Italy, lives in New York.]
I do not know exactly why, but it seems to me that images do not belong to anybody but are instead there, at the disposal of all.
Susie Linfield
[Writer and critic, New York, lives in New York.]
…it is the camera—the still camera, the film camera, the video camera, and now the digital camera—that has done so much to globalize our consciences; it is the camera that brought us the twentieth century’s bad news. Today it is, quite simply, impossible to say, “I did not know”: photographs have robbed us of the alibi of ignorance.
A.D. Coleman
[Critic and writer, b. 1943, New York, lives in New York.]
Any photographer worth his/her salt—that is, any photographer of professional caliber, in control of the craft, regardless of imagistic bent—can make virtually anything “look good.” Which means, of course, that she or he can make virtually anything “look bad”—or look just about any way at all. After all, that is the real work of photography: making things look, deciding how a thing is to appear in the image.
