“Images are significant surfaces. Images signify – mainly – something ‘out there’ in space and time that they have to make comprehensible to us as abstractions (as reductions of the four dimensions of space and time to the two surface dimensions). This specific ability to abstract surfaces out of space and time is what is known as ‘imagination’. It is the precondition for the production and decoding of images.”
Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography
“A picture is a picture. It should not generate the illusion of depth. Reality can be as deep as it wants. I make my picture on the surface.”
Thomas Ruff