A.D. Coleman
[Critic and writer, b. 1943, New York, lives in New York.]

 It is no coincidence that one cardinal rule in brainwashing is to remove from the victim all photographs of himself and people he has known. 
 Photography is, in its relation to the casual camera user, an inordinately generous medium. Most anyone who exposes a goodly amount of film (or even a small amount regularly) ends up with a certain proportion of negative which, appropriately rendered in print form, could provide images of at least passing interest. 
 More and more, lately, I’ve seen shows—not just in galleries, but even in museums—by young photographers hot off the press whose bodies of work have little to say and lack any distinction beyond their statistically unique amalgamations of facets of their mentors and other influences. In their early or middle twenties, they already have lists of exhibition and publication credits as long as your arm. Many have already been academically recycled and are actually teaching, thus perpetuating this syndrome. (1973) 
 Photographing appears to be nothing more than concretized seeing, and seeing is believing. 
 Neutrality is in itself a political stance, favoring as it does the status quo. Why have we permitted this mythology of objectivity/neutrality to be pulled over our eyes? Why do we tolerate it from the mouths of those who, more than any, should know better—the photographers themselves? 
 The morphology of photography would have been vastly different had photographs resisted the urge to acquire the credentials of esthetic respectability for the medium, and instead simply pursued it as a way of producing evidence of intelligent life on earth. 
 To work in the directorial mode requires a photographer to violate more than a hundred years of trust in order to engage voluntarily in active deception. As a rule it involves an image-maker in a symbology that is not “found” but consciously chosen, imposed, and explored. 
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