photography manipulation Quotes

Photography today appears to be in a state of flight... The familiar is made strange, the unfamiliar grotesque. The amateur forces his Sundays into a series of unnatural poses.

Fashion pictures show people looking glamorous. Travel pictures show a place looking at its best, nothing to do with the reality. In the cookery pages, the food always looks amazing, right? Most of the pictures we consume are propaganda.

What if I said that every photograph I made was set up? From the photograph, you can't prove otherwise. You don't know anything from the photograph about how it was made, really.

The idea of beauty today is a bloody mess. It's really awful. You look in the fashion magazines and see all of these retouched people. Some guys called retouchers go on the computer and take away everything that you are and then call it photography. I think it's such an insult.

We are drowning in images. Photography is used as a propaganda tool, which serves to sell products and ideas. I use the same approach to show aspects of reality.

The minute you point a camera at something, you are manipulating the image, because you are cropping out whatever is to the left and right of it. The minute you put a light on someone, you are manipulating the image.

I got a job in the tear-sheets department, ripping up magazines like People, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and Time, and delivering the editorial pages.... So I began to use a camera to make fake photographs of the ads. By re-photographing a magazine page and then developing the film in a cheap lab, the photos came out very strange.

As [John Heartfield] was playing with the fire of appearance, reality took fire around him... The scraps of photographs that he formerly manoeuvred for the pleasure of stupification, under his fingers began to signify.

I respect newspapers, but the reality is that magazine 'photojournalism' is finished. They want illustrations, Photoshopped pictures of movie stars.

I think of [my photographs] as found paintings because I don't crop them, I don't manipulate them or anything. So they're like found objects to me.

I believe it was probably less than ten minutes that went by from the invention of photography to the point where people realized that they could lie with photographs.

Every photograph could be set up. If one could imagine it, one could set it up. The whole discussion is a way of not talking about photographs.

With chemical film, it was possible to alter photographs, but you had to be an expert. That's not true any more. The LA Times fired a photographer at the beginning of the Iraq War for editing two shots together. Photography is crumbling. Certainly it is for the newspapers a bit now, isn't it? There will be painting again, absolutely!

Every photograph is a fake from start to finish.