Lucy Lippard
[Critic and writer, b. 1936, New York, lives in Galisteo, New Mexico.]
Despite having been awarded the dubious honor of arthood, all photography is still perceived as having one foot in the real world, a toe in the chilly waters of verisimilitude, no matter how often it is demonstrated that photographs can and do lie.
There is indeed something omnivorous about the act of photography. It offers a way of responding to everything about everything.
Men have dominated the field of landscape photography just as they have dominated the land itself. Thus “shooting” a “virgin” landscape has been man’s work—hunting, not gardening.
Photographers find themselves directly in competition with mass media’s misrepresentations of women. So the photographic terrain is particularly contested from a political point of view.
The camera was another weapon in the wars of domination.
A piece of paper or a photograph is as much an object, or as ‘material’ as a ton of lead.
Photography is about looking around, which is a prerequisite for actually seeing. It operates in that place between art and life, where I like to work, and where I am joined by a great many other women artists whose focus has been “work” and “home” in the broadest sense—that is, lived experience, familiar but unexplored aspects of daily life.
Given the lack of public skills in reading photographs, given that photographic content is sometimes buried in beauty, contemporary landscape photographers are often condemned to making pretty pictures. Dramatic clouds and sifting light can overwhelm more mundane information. Yet who can resist beautiful landscape pictures of one kind or another? Not I.
