As Plato insisted two thousand years ago, it is not by means of the image that moral, ethical, or political knowledge is produced.

... photography, like all camera-made images such as film and video, effaces the marks of its making (and maker) at the click of a shutter. A photograph appears to be self-generated - as though it had created itself.

As Plato insisted two thousand years ago, it is not by means of the image that moral, ethical, or political knowledge is produced.

Contemporary art photography, or, more specifically, what I would term mainstream art photography, represents for the most part the mining of an exhausted lode.

Art photography, although long since legitimized by all the conventional discourses of fine art, seems destined perpetually to recapitulate all the rituals of the arriviste. Inasmuch as one of those rituals consists of the establishment of suitable ancestry, a search for distinguished bloodlines, it inevitably happens that photographic history and criticism are more concern with notions of tradition and continuity than with those of rupture and change.

While the aesthetics of consumption (photographic or otherwise) requires a heroicized myth of the artist, the exemplary practice of the player-off codes requires only an operator, a producer, a scriptor, or a pasticheur.

In the final analysis, photography... is ever a hireling, ever the hired gun.