Andy Grundberg
[Critic, curator, and educator, lives in Washington, D.C.]
[Postmodern photography] implies the exhaustion of the image universe: it suggests that a photographer can find more than enough images already existing in the world without the bother of making new ones.
Douglas Crimp
[Writer, theorist and critic, b. 1944, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, lives in Rochester, New York.]
Through reproductive technology, postmodernist art dispenses with the aura. The fiction of the creating subject gives way to a frank confiscation, quotation, excerptation, accumulation, and repetition of already existing images. Notions of originality, authenticity, and presence... are undermined.
Gilles Peress
[Photographer, b. 1946, Neuilly, France, lives in New York.]
There’s a big choice to be made right now. Either you fall on the postmodernist incapacity for dealing with the world, which is that there is no accurate description of the world so there is no point in going out to look at the world. And if you’re not going to look at the world then certainly you’re not going to change it.
Richard Misrach
[Photographer, b. 1949, Los Angeles, lives in San Francisco.]
The very act of representation has been so thoroughly challenged in recent years by postmodern theories that it is impossible not to see the flaws everywhere, in any practice of photography. Traditional genres in particular—journalism, documentary studies, and fine-art photography—have become shells, or forms emptied of meaning.
Douglas Crimp
[Writer, theorist and critic, b. 1944, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, lives in Rochester, New York.]
The desire of representation exists only insofar as the original is always deferred. It is only in the absence of the original that representation can take place.
Stephen Shore
[Photographer, b. 1947, New York, lives in New York.]
Even in ordinary reproduction [photography] verges on facsimile.
Paul Virilio
[Writer and theorist, b. 1932, Paris, lives in La Rochelle, France.]
Images contaminate us like viruses.
Andy Grundberg
[Critic, curator, and educator, lives in Washington, D.C.]
There is no place in the postmodern world for a belief in the authenticity of experience, in the sanctity of the individual artist’s vision, in genius or originality. What postmodern art finally tells us is that things have been used up, that we are at the end of the line, that we are all prisoners of what we see. Clearly these are disconcerting and radical ideas, and it takes no great imagination to see that photography, as a nearly indiscriminate producer of images, is in large part responsible for them.
