Stephen Shore
[Photographer, b. 1947, New York, lives in New York.]
I went on to Flickr and it was just thousands of pieces of shit, and I just couldn’t believe it. And it’s just all conventional, it’s all cliches, it’s just one visual convention after another.
Rondal Partridge
[Photographer, b. 1917, San Francisco, d. 2015, Berkeley, California.]
So many people are diverted to doing what people want photographed—fashion models, buildings, mountains—they get to thinking those photographs are good.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau
[Writer and theorist, b. 1947, New York, lives in Santa Barbara, California.]
Contemporary art photography, or, more specifically, what I would term mainstream art photography, represents for the most part the mining of an exhausted lode.
Edward Weston
[Photographer, b. 1886, Highland Park, Illinois, d. 1958, Wildcat Hill, California.]
When subject matter is forced to fit into preconceived patterns, there can be no freshness of vision. Following rules of composition can only lead to a tedious repetition of pictorial clichés.
Annette Messager
[Artist, b. 1943, Berck-sur-Mer, France, lives in Paris.]
Pornography is about images that are repeated, saturated. Images of the human body, not nature. What I find in pornography is precisely the repetition of the same: the clichés of pornography. There can be no real transgression, just an image that repeats itself.
Jean Baudrillard
[Writer and theorist, b. 1929, Reims, France, d. 2007, Paris.]
You think you photograph a particular scene for the pleasure it gives. In fact it’s the scene that wants to be photographed. You’re merely an extra in the production.
Don DeLillo
[Writer, b. 1936, New York, lives in New York.]
We’re not here to capture an image. We’re here to maintain one.
(On photographers shooting “the most photographed barn in America.”)
Ed Ruscha
[Artist, b. 1937, Omaha, Nebraska, lives in Los Angeles.]
Unfortunately, there was no Jackson Pollock of the camera.
