Pipilotti Rist
[Artist, b. 1962, Reinthal, Switzerland, lives in Zurich and Los Angeles.]
Women are less interested in watching two people having sex than in understanding how and what these people are feeling when they are having sex. If you kiss someone, you want to know what the other person is feeling. So I want to find pictures that express what the other feels.
Charis Wilson
[Model, b. 1914, San Francisco, d. 2009, Santa Cruz, California.]
Usually when people got to know us a little, someone would look very seriously and say, “Would you mind telling me how— what it was that brought you two together?” And Edward [Weston] would give an anticipatory smirk and say, “Sex.”
Marilyn Monroe (Norma Jeane Mortenson)
[Actress, b. 1926, Los Angeles, d. 1962, Los Angeles.]
It’s like being screwed by a thousand guys and you can’t get pregnant.
(On what happens between her and still cameras, to photographer Ernst Cunningham.)
Abigail Solomon-Godeau
[Writer and theorist, b. 1947, New York, lives in Santa Barbara, California.]
That erotic and pornographic photographs were produced almost from the medium’s inception should come as no surprise. That it does so is a testimonial only to the near-total elision of this fact from the standard histories in the field... Indeed, it seems reasonable to assume that almost as soon as there were viable daguerreotypes, there were pornographic ones.
Eve Arnold
[Photographer, b. 1913, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 2011, London.]
...if you think of modern art like sex in all its forms—heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual, multipartnered, bestial, whatever, with absolutely no holds barred and with everything available and permissible—that would be “modern art.”
Ren Hang
[Photographer and poet, b. 1987, Changchun, Jilin Province, China, d. 2017, Beijing.]
I do not know what is pornography. If we say that nudity is pornography, sex is erotic, then I too love porn! Eros filled my life! I think nudity is the most realistic. I like real.
Robert Mapplethorpe
[Photographer, b. 1946, Floral Park, Long Island, d. 1989, Boston, Massachusetts.]
When I have sex with someone I forget who I am. For a minute I even forget I’m human. It’s the same thing when I’m behind a camera. I forget I exist.
Philippe Halsman
[Photographer, b. 1906, Riga, Latvia, d. 1979, New York.]
I drifted into photography like one drifts into prostitution. First I did it to please myself, then I did it to please my friends, and eventually I did it for money.
