Mario Sorrenti
[Photographer, b. 1971, Naples, Italy, lives in New York.]
Now I love the act of creating a new image. When everything comes together, it feels like ecstasy. It’s like a climax.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
[The pornographic photograph] is always a naive photograph, without intention and without calculation. Like a shop window which shows only one illuminated piece of jewelry, it is completely constituted by the presentation of only one thing: sex…
Edward Weston
[Photographer, b. 1886, Highland Park, Illinois, d. 1958, Wildcat Hill, California.]
By all means tell your Board that pubic hair has definitely been part of my development as an artist, tell them it has been the most important part, that I like it black, brown, red or golden, curly or straight, all sizes and shapes.
(To Museum of Modern Art curator Beaumont Newhall, after being told the museum was reluctant to show nudes revealing pubic hair.)
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.
Jean Baudrillard
[Writer and theorist, b. 1929, Reims, France, d. 2007, Paris.]
Images have become our true sex objects. It is this promiscuity and the ubiquity of images, this viral contamination of images which are the fatal characteristics of our culture.
Philip Jones Griffiths
[Photojournalist, b. 1936, Rhuddian, Wales, d. 2008, London.]
The only thing we photographers really want more than life, more than sex, more than anything, is to be invisible.
Nan Goldin
[Photographer, b. 1953, Washington, D.C., lives in New York and Paris.]
… I wrote myself in as the lover. Sometimes, the obsession lasted for years. It was photography as the sublimation of sex, a means of seduction, and a way to remain a crucial part of my subjects’ lives. A chance to touch someone with a camera rather than physically.
Nobuyoshi Araki
[Photographer, b. 1940, Tokyo, lives in Tokyo.]
...the time when a picture is taken is like an emotion, it’s like a sexual encounter. It’s like a fuck! So, timing is very important.
