Roberta McGrath
[Critic, lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.]
“Taking” a photograph is a way of making sense of the world. It imposes and order, a unity on the world which is lacking. To take a photograph is to exercise an illusory control, a mastery which is characteristic of voyeurism. But the sexual connotations of the verb are also obvious: the slang for carnal knowledge. It implies a physical penetration of the other while the photograph is a penetration of the space of the other.
Charis Wilson
[Model, b. 1914, San Francisco, d. 2009, Santa Cruz, California.]
Altogether it was a magical place. The silence and emptiness, the beauty of the wind-sculptured forms, the absence of any living things besides ourselves—all these combined to give me an exhilarating sense of freedom. As soon as the sun warmed things up, I took off my clothes and began diving down a steep slope... I was reminded of the childhood games of statues as I kept returning to the top of the bank to relaunch myself, and each slide down ended in a more abandoned position.
(On posing nude at 22 in the Oceano dunes for her 50-year-old lover Edward Weston.)
Larry Clark
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1943, Tulsa, Oklahoma, lives in New York.]
I wanted to present the way kids see things, but without all this baggage... You know... they’re living in the moment not thinking about anything beyond that and that’s what I wanted to catch. And I wanted the viewer to feel like you’re there with them—you can be there fucking, smoking dope, having sex.
Robert Mapplethorpe
[Photographer, b. 1946, Floral Park, Long Island, d. 1989, Boston, Massachusetts.]
I did a picture of a guy with his finger up his cock. I think that for what it is, it’s a perfect picture, because the hand gestures are beautiful. I know most people couldn’t see the hand gestures, but compositionally I think it works. I think the hand gesture is beautiful.
Catherine Opie
[Photographer, b. 1961, Sandusky, Ohio, lives in Los Angeles.]
I’m glad there is a queer, out, dyke artist that’s being called an American photographer.
Helmut Newton
[Photographer, b. 1920, Berlin, d. 2004, Los Angeles.]
The photographs don’t arouse me. All I can think about is the hard work it took to make them.
Edmund Teske
[Photographer, b. 1911, Chicago, Illinois, d. 1996, Los Angeles.]
I show the beauty and the wonder of the male nude and I show him in terms of his position as lord of the lingam.
Hugh Hefner
[Publisher and playboy, b. 1926, Chicago, d. 2017, Los Angeles.]
... Orwellian Newspeak was really all about the notion that you could change the labels and the language of things and you would change the perception. And we have seen that certainly in terms of sex in really dramatic form in the last twenty years in which sexual images that were perceived in the past as simply pin-up pictures were then perceived and called exploitation and then eventually called pornography, and they are the same innocent pin-up pictures.
