Douglas Crimp
[Writer, theorist and critic, b. 1944, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, lives in Rochester, New York.]
...nearly 150 years after its invention in the 1830s, photography was
discovered, discovered to have been art all the while.
Postmodernism may be said to be founded in part on this paradox: it is photography’s reevaluation as a modernist medium that signals the end of Modernism.
...representation takes place because it is always already there in the world
as representation. It was, of course, [Edward] Weston who said that the photograph must be visualized in full before the exposure is made... The
a priori Weston had in mind was not really in his mind at all; it was in the world, and Weston only copied it.
If all aspects of the culture use this new operation [appropriation], then the operation itself cannot indicate a specific reflection on the culture.
...photography not only secures the admittance of various objects, fragments of objects, details of objects to the museum, it is also the organizing device: it reduces the now even vaster heterogeneity to a single perfect similitude. Through photographic reproduction a cameo takes up residence on the page next to painted tondo or a sculpted relief...
[Appropriationist] artists have turned to the available images in the culture around them. But they subvert the standard signifying function of those pictures, tied to their captions, their commentaries, their narrative sequences—tied, that is, to the illusion that they are directly transparent to a signified.
