Geoffrey Batchen
[Photohistorian, b. 1956, Australia, lives in Wellington, New Zealand.]
Remember that image of Truman holding up the premature issue of the Chicago Daily Tribune declaring his defeat by Dewey? It is in the Corbis catalogue. Remember Malcolm X pointing out over his crowd of listeners, the airship Hindenberg exploding in the New Jersey sky, that naked Vietnamese child running towards us after being burned by napalm, Churchill flashing his V-for-victory sign, Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, Patty Hearst posing with her gun in front of the Symbionese Liberation Army banner, LBJ being sworn into office aboard Air Force One beside a blood-splattered Jackie? Corbis offers to lease us electronic versions of them all; it offers to sell us, in other words, the ability to reproduce our memories of our own culture, and therefore of ourselves.
David Douglas Duncan
[Photojournalist, b. 1916, Kansas City, Missouri, lives in Mougins, France.]
It’s very simple... this banging around with a camera and typewriter as a “business” is just one helluva lot of fun.
Brian Duffy
[Photographer, b. 1933, London, d. 2010, London.]
Ninety-nine per cent of my work was advertising and crap. The people who were hiring me I didn’t like. Keeping a civil tongue up the rectum of a society that keeps you paid is an art which I was devoid of. I had nothing more to say in photographs.
(1979, on why he quit photography)
Richard Prince
[Artist, b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone, lives in New York.]
Advertising images aren’t associated with an author. It’s as if their presence were complete—classical in fact. They are too good to be true. They look like they have no history to them—like they showed up all at once. They look like what art always wants to look like.
Bruce Davidson
[Photographer, b. 1933, Oak Park, Illinois, lives in New York.]
In those days [1948], to be a photographer was actually to be a nonentity. My brother went to college, grad school, a PhD. I had this little camera.
Robert Morris
[Artist and theorist, b. 1931, Kansas City, Missouri, lives in New York.]
There is probably no defense against the malevolent powers of the photograph to convert every visible aspect of the world into a static, consumable image.
Danny Lyon
[Photographer, b. 1942, New York, lives in Ulster County, New York.]
My thirteen-year-old has a sign on his wall that reads “Corporate Rock Sucks.” Well now there's something called “Corporate Photography.” It’s corporations calling the shots in the world of photography. If Kodak is behind you they’ll make six copies of your exhibit, with prints big enough to sleep on and put full-page ads in the New York Times. So the corporations, who already own the media, have now bought up photography.
Stephen Shore
[Photographer, b. 1947, New York, lives in New York.]
I meet young artists and it becomes clear that with some the main motivation is getting a show in Chelsea. It strikes me that this is very different to the way it was for me, which was that I wanted to understand photography and the world and myself.
