Martha Rosler
[Artist, b. 1943, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New York.]
The deskilling of photography takes place programmatically in conceptual art. It rejects all of modernist photographic aesthetics with a Duchampian approach, saying that a photograph is a mere indexical trace recorded by an optical chemical system. And if you take a photograph of a gas station, that is worth as much as everybody else being photographed on earth.
If we want to call up more hopeful or positive uses of manipulated images, we must choose images in which manipulation is itself apparent, not just as a form of artistic reflexivity but to make a larger point about the truth value of photographs and illusionistic elements in the surface of (and even definition of)
reality.
Guy Debord
[Writer and theorist, b. 1931, Paris, d. 1994, Champot, Upper Loire, France.]
Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.
Annie Sprinkle (Ellen Steinberg)
[Artist, writer, pornographer, educator, b. 1954, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, lives in Santa Cruz, California.]
I always knew I’d be some kind of artist. I thought I’d be an art teacher. In fact, I am an art teacher. When I went into porn, I thought, Oh I’ll never be an art teacher. But I’m hired now as an artist because I went into porn. But I don’t make regular porn anymore. I make post-porn, post-porn modernism...
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.
John Baldessari
[Artist, b. 1931, National City, California, lives in Venice, California.]
What the camera has done is show us what to concentrate upon; and consequently, what to leave out.
Geoffrey Batchen
[Photohistorian, b. 1956, Australia, lives in Wellington, New Zealand.]
And within the logic of [the electronic economy], the identity of an image is no longer distinguishable from any other piece of datum, be it animal, vegetable, or “experiential” in origin. Indeed, given the rhyzomatic structure of the electronic universe, the point of origin is no longer of consequence. All that matters (in every sense of the word) is the possibility of instantaneous dissemination and exact reproduction of data.
Richard Prince
[Artist, b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone, lives in New York.]
There was a point where I noticed that things had changed in the Marlboro ad. They got rid of the famous guy, a certain model who used to be in all the ads. They took him out and started using other people. That’s when I went after it. That’s when I stole it.... This was a famous campaign. If you’re going to steal something, you know, you go to the bank.
