Orlan (Mireille Suzanne Francette Porte)
[Artist, b. 1947, St. Etienne, France, lives in Ivry-sur-Seine, France.]
Only a few kinds of images force you to shut your eyes: death, suffering, the opening of the body, some aspects of pornography for some people, and for others, giving birth. In this case, the eyes become black holes in which the image is absorbed willingly or unwillingly, these images are swallowed up and hit just where it hurts, without passing though the usual filters.
Jacob Riis
[Photographer and reformer, b. 1849, Denmark, d. 1914, Barre, Massachusetts.]
When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.
Clarence John Laughlin
[Photographer, b. 1905, Lake Charles, Louisiana, d. 1985, New Orleans, Louisiana.]
As a whole, I am interested in the symbolic, rather than the literal use of the camera.
Helmut Newton
[Photographer, b. 1920, Berlin, d. 2004, Los Angeles.]
If I have really nothing to do, I start spinning a tale for myself, which is one of the most pleasant ways of spending time. My pictures are like a story that has no beginning, no middle, and no end.
Bill Viola
[Artist, b. 1951, New York City, lives in Los Angeles.]
The electronic image is not fixed to any material base and, like our DNA, it has become a code that can circulate to any container that will hold it, defying death as it travels at the speed of light.
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre
[Artist and one of the originators of photography, b. 1787, Cormeilles-en-Parisis, Val-d'Oise, France, d. 1851, Bry-sur-Marne, France.]
I have seized the light. I have arrested its flight.
Siegfried Kracauer
[Media critic and sociologist, b. 1889, Frankfurt, Germany, d. 1966, New York.]
...the world has become a photographable present, and the photographed present has been entirely eternalized. Seemingly ripped from the clutch of death, in reality it has succumbed to it.
William Burroughs
[Writer, b. 1914, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1997, Lawrence, Kansas.]
The photo collage is a way to travel that must be used with skill and precision if we are to arrive... The collage as a flexible hieroglyph language of juxtaposition: A collage makes a statement.
