Jean-François Chevrier
[Art historian, critic, and curator, b. 1954, Lyon, France, lives in Paris.]

 I cannot understand why some people try to write a history of photography that is separated from the history of modern art. 
 To look, to record, to inscribe, to reproduce, to imitate, to reveal, to imagine are for me the seven keys of photographic imagination. 
 Many artists, having assimilated the Conceptualists’ explorations to varying degrees, have reused the painterly model and use photography, quite consciously and systematically, to produce works that stand alone and exist as “photographic paintings”... 
 Photography has not invented anything. 
 It was only with the emergence of the Conceptualist approaches of the late 1960s that the opposition between artists using photography and photographers became explicit.