The 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

Categorized in : World Culture Waiting

In the final analysis, photography... is ever a hireling, ever th... by Abigail Solomon-Godeau

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

Abigail Solomon-Godeau

finals gun photography

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-Godeau

exhausted photography art

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

Abigail Solomon-Godeau

plato mean years

... 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-Godeau

cameras photography self

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.

Abigail Solomon-Godeau

photography long art

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.

Abigail Solomon-Godeau

artist player practice