Lucas Samaras
[Artist, b. 1936, Kastoria, Greece, lives in New York.]
I am my own investigation territory.
Douglas Crimp
[Writer, theorist and critic, b. 1944, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, lives in Rochester, New York.]
[Cindy Sherman’s] photographs reverse the terms of art and autobiography. They use art not to reveal the artist’s true self but to show the self as an imaginary construct. There is no real Cindy Sherman in these photographs; there are only the guises she assumes. And she does not create these guises; she simply chooses them in the way that any of us do.
Daniel Boorstin
[Historian and scholar, b. 1914, Atlanta, Georgia, d. 2004, Washington, D.C.]
As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has been abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.
Anthony Hernandez
[Photographer, b. 1947, Los Angeles, lives in Los Angeles.]
I love the idea that I’m not there [in the photographs]. But I am there.
Franz Kafka
[Writer, b. 1883, Prague, d. 1924, Prague.]
A picture of my existence... would show a useless wooden stake covered in snow... stuck loosely at a slant in the ground in a ploughed field on the edge of a vast open plain on a dark winter night.
A.D. Coleman
[Critic and writer, b. 1943, New York, lives in New York.]
Photographs are of course about their makers, and are to be read for what they disclose in that regard no less than for what they reveal of the world as their makers comprehend, invent, and describe it.
Arthur Danto
[Writer, b. 1924, Ann Arbor, Michigan, d. 2013, New York.]
It takes a certain suspension of squeamishness to see a Polaroid that Mapplethorpe devoted to his own engorged penis, held erect like a blunt club by means of a leather loop around his testicles, in the same aesthetic terms as the Photo-Secessionist masterpieces ... But that was the paradox of Mapplethorpe’s achievement—to show what one can barely stand to look at in photographs so beautiful one can hardly takes one’s eye off them.
Alec Soth
[Photographer, b. 1969, Minneapolis, Minnesota, lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.]
Whether you are Minor White or Robert Frank, almost every photograph starts with an act of pure description—a window. But every now and then you catch a glimpse of the photographer’s reflection. The mirror is just another function of the window.
