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Quote by Louis Aragon

“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.”

Quote by Louis Aragon

Author

Louis Aragon was a French poet, novelist, playwright, and literary critic. Born on October 3, 1897, and died on December 24, 1982, he was a leading figure in the Surrealist movement and is known for his unique poetic style and profound political consciousness. more

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“Photography intervenes in a very strange way. It makes the streets, gates, squares of the city into illustrations of a trashy novel, draws off the banal obviousness of this ancient architecture to inject it with the most pristine intensity.”

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“You know exactly what I think of photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable. (In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz)”

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“As small, quick, foolproof cameras became generally available, moreover, the camera has been used so much and so flabbily by so many people that it has acted as a sort of contraceptive on the ability to see.”

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“The camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time.”

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“The camera is just a machine, which records with impressive and as a rule very cruel faithfulness.”

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“The artist's task is not to alter the world as the eye sees it into a world of aesthetic reality, but to perceive the aesthetic reality within the actual reality. (On photographs by Helen Levitt)”

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“It is clear enough by now to most people that the camera never lies is a foolish saying. Yet it is doubtful whether most people realize how extraordinarily slippery a liar the camera is.”

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“It is probably well on the conservative side to estimate that during the past ten to fifteen years the camera has destroyed a thousand pairs of eyes, corrupted ten thousand, and seriously deceived a hundred thousand, for every one pair that it has opened, and taught.”

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