Contemporary art photography, or, more specifically, what I would term mainstream art photography, represents for the most part the mining of an exhausted lode.
Abigail Solomon-GodeauIn the final analysis, photography... is ever a hireling, ever the hired gun.
Abigail Solomon-GodeauWhile 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.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau... 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.
Abigail Solomon-GodeauAs Plato insisted two thousand years ago, it is not by means of the image that moral, ethical, or political knowledge is produced.
Abigail Solomon-GodeauThe thing itself is never just out there in the world waiting to be framed by the photographer's Leica; rather, it is something dynamically produced in the act of representation and reception and already subject to the grids of meaning imposed on it by culture, history, language, and so forth.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau