Walter Benn Michaels
[Writer and critic, b. 1948, lives in Chicago.]

 What a [Cindy Sherman] photograph shows is an object that has been called into the world by the existence of cameras; the pose, as pose, calls attention to this fact and criticizes the world the camera has made; the camera, then, records this critique. 
 The break between painting and photography is sharp because it is a break not between two technologies of representation but between something that is a technology of representation [painting] and something that is not [photography].