Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Imperfect technique has come to be appreciated precisely because it breaks the sedate equation of Nature and
Beauty.
John Baldessari
[Artist, b. 1931, National City, California, lives in Venice, California.]
What I try to do is reinvigorate strategies and clichés I find in Hollywood movies. At a certain point I had these huge folders, each one classified according to subject matter or genre: people with guns, people kissing, Indians and cowboys falling off horses, getting shot, getting shot with arrows—almost every plot device. Then I cropped the cheap, recycled imagery to give exhausted images new meaning, or at least something other than their original meaning. I’m basically reassembling atoms to give them a meaning that’s more
au courant.
Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
Photographers show you what a sunset looks like, they show you what a moonrise over Hernandez looks like, they show you women’s breasts or empty car lots, but they don’t play with your mind. I’m not saying all photographers should play with your mind, but it’s an option they don’t exercise. I think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know.
Andy Grundberg
[Critic, curator, and educator, lives in Washington, D.C.]
...photography repeats itself unconsciously and unavoidably, producing stereotypes that then are repeated
ad infinitum.
Paul Strand
[Photographer, b. 1890, New York, d. 1976, Oregeval, France.]
Look at the things around you, the immediate world around you. If you are alive, it will mean something to you, and if you care enough about photography, and if you know how to use it, you will want to photograph that meaningness. If you let other people’s vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau
[Writer and theorist, b. 1947, New York, lives in Santa Barbara, California.]
Art photography, although long since legitimized by all the conventional discourses of fine art, seems destined perpetually to recapitulate all the rituals of the
arriviste. Inasmuch as one of those rituals consists of the establishment of suitable ancestry, a search for distinguished bloodlines, it inevitably happens that photographic history and criticism are more concern with notions of tradition and continuity than with those of rupture and change.
Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
It was almost a taboo to photograph the ordinary daily existence around you, all the things that would eventually also become clichés of photography.
Edward Steichen
[Photographer and curator, b. 1879, Luxembourg, Germany, d. 1973, West Redding, Connecticut.]
I don’t care about making photography an art. I want to make good photographs. I’d like to know who first got it into his head that dreaminess and mist is an art. Take things as they are; take good photographs and the art will take care of itself.
(1923)
